Telstra annual performance reviews
It’s performance review time in Telstra, with the 2017 operation scheduled to get under way from 5 June. From that date, My Future will be open for individuals and management to begin the review process.
The CWU met with Telstra on 25 May to get an update on the review process which has been modified since last year. Telstra says that its aim has been to get greater consistency in performance assessment across the company through adoption of principles that will be used by all business units.
Under the new approach, each business unit will be given a rating based on its overall contribution to company performance and results. But that rating won’t necessarily apply to everyone in that part of the business – which of course it shouldn’t.
E-bulletin readers will recall that this time last year CEO Andy Penn warned employees in Networks that they may not be eligible for some forms of incentive payment because of the series of outages that had hit the network during the first half of 2016.
At the time, the CWU pointed out that this would amount to penalising employees for decisions, such as levels of network investment, over which they had no control.
Under the latest principles, it appears that business unit management will bear most of the pain in such circumstances. If a business unit gets a poor rating, it is expected that the Enterprise Leadership Group (ELG) will too. But there will be no blanket rating for all that unit’s employees.
The CWU does not support performance-based pay systems for the very reason that the discretion they allow management opens the door to all sorts of injustice, not only collective punishment but, perhaps more commonly, local forms of discrimination and intimidation.
Nevertheless the union welcomes Telstra’s recognition in this instance that a wage policy that involves penalising employees for management’s mistakes or underperformance is both unfair and counter-productive.
