Stressful Month

For the past 5 years, the end of October is a stressful month for me. That is when I have to start preparing the performance evaluation of the individuals in my team, rank them and review their salaries with a view towards adjusting them.When I first took over the team 5 years ago, I had the unpleasant task of telling a majority of my Japan based team that their salaries would be CUT between 5% to 15%. And I had to do this for 3 years!! Why? Traditionally, salary adjustments in japan was based on seniority and not performance. So in the new Agilent, where salaries was based on performance and not seniority, they found many low performers being paid top dollars (or Yen). So HR instituted a 3 year program to bring the salary plans to a level to reflect on performance. I probably had a few of my subordinates calling me "baka" behind my back!!.

In the past 5 years, I have also seen the salary plans for China go from about 30% below the Malaysian plan to 10% above today. If you think operating in China is cheap, think again. Malaysia is actually cheaper for multinational companies. All of my subordinates - except those based in India, earns more than me when converted to US dollars!!. And India is fast catching up.

Since the financial crisis that Agilent underwent in the early years, our salary adjustments had progressed from hiring anniversaries to February of a new fiscal year. What this meant was that EVERYBODY gets their pay adjusted (if any) effective from 1st February. This year, 2007, it even got delayed to 1st March (but backdated to 1st Feb for accounting reasons).

Then a few weeks ago, all managers were informed that we needed to submit employees ranking, performance feed backs and salary reviews between 1st to 18th November!!. To get these done in a timely manner, many of us had to start at the beginning of October. Ranking was relatively easier and that exercise is completed except for the data entry into our HR system (which commences on 1st Nov). The biggest time thief is performance evaluations and feed backs. I have 15 people reporting to me. I spend an average of 1.5 to 2 days per employee to research , get feed backs from other people and write up the performance evaluation. That's at least one working month of information gathering and documentation!!. Wah liao - sure die!!

On top of that, my WW boss is asking me to set up a new team of 8 people. Between asking for resumes, interviews, hiring and training, I will be lucky to get enough sleep and maintain my medicated hypertension within safe levels. Challenging!!!!

So with that - my blog entries for the next few weeks would be less - if I am lucky - about once per week.