Measuring Employee Performance with Agile-Lean Style

by Masa K. Maeda

A few months back I was at eBay's headquarters in San Jose, California, USA, having a conversation about performance reviews with one of its executives. Like most large companies, eBay offers bonuses to its employees based on individual performance, which is expected to have improved from the previous work period, be it yearly, semiannually, or quarterly. The criteria used is along the lines of, say, increased number of sales, larger number of lines of code written, more defects detected, faster IT response, and so on. In agile-lean thinking, we value team effort more than individual effort and consider individual rewards to hinder teamwork improvement. The eBay executive insisted that individuals enjoy being recognized for their own efforts and that a team-level reward doesn't feel quite right, so how can we reward individually in an agile-lean environment?