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Karma – an ingenious appraisal system designed at Digicorp

Last month we  launched Karma – an ingenious appraisal system designed at Digicorp.

It is one of the most radical steps we have taken so far in our bid to become a transparent organization. It is a leap of faith in humanity. It is one more step to change the way business is done.

Wikipedia defines Karma as:

Karma in Indian religions is the concept of “action” or “deed”, understood as that which causes the entire cycle of cause and effect

For Digicorp it also means:

An ingenious appraisal system

The obvious question is Why?

Well, so far the appraisal system in Digicorp has been very informal.

• We do one to one meetings every year in October.
• Before that we find out expectations of all team members.
• We find out what is the market situation via our friends in the same industry.
• We define buckets based on that data.
• We try to satisfy each person’s expectation as far as we can keeping those buckets in mind.
• We generally avoid giving negative feedback in these meetings and talk mostly about what are the next year’s goals.

Nothing new here. Many companies have similar process but there are some problems with this.

• This appraisal system is not tightly linked to company’s performance. Even if company faired poorly, most used to get the increment they expected.
• It was too much dependant on the projects a person worked on in last one year (or last couple of months!).This is not good especially for the services company like ours. An employee doesn’t have any control for the kind of project she gets. Some projects are destined to fail from the beginning and she should not get the blame for that. Even though we avoid talking negative things, the final raise does get influenced by this.
• Better negotiators used to get better deal.Some people are well prepared for the one to one meetings. They are ready with all the positive points before meeting and will negotiate strongly for what they want. An employee who is shy or who is focused more on work at that time may not get what she expects because she is not prepared.
• The month of appraisal is the most stressful time of the year for everybody. Productivity takes a deep dive.
• If somebody is not satisfied with the raise, she has to wait for a year to get the next increment. In most cases it is too long to wait.

So to address above shortcomings we designed Karma, which distributes company’s profit as fairly as possible.

We have already given this year’s increments based on Karma and mostly it has worked. There are few unsatisfied souls and we are not proud of that fact. We are working hard to improve it.

Please go ahead and explore the system in below presentation. We know it is not perfect yet but your feedback can make it perfect.

Let us know what you think.