How to avoid the year-end ＂one-hammer performance＂ in performance appraisal？

Recently, Qinghai Province broke the year-end "one-hammer achievement" situation of performance appraisal, and greatly adjusted the assessment content. After this year’s adjustment, the usual assessment content has been increased from 4 to 11, and the common content of annual assessment has been reduced from 17 to 9, effectively avoiding the problems of crowded assessment and cumbersome assessment.

Source | National Governance Weekly and People’s Forum Network (rmltwz)

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The Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee put forward the strategic goal of promoting the modernization of the national governance system and governance capacity, and the 19th CPC National Congress made a major judgment on the transformation of major social contradictions in China, which provided a strong impetus for further improving and perfecting the cadre performance appraisal system. Since the reform and opening up, all regions and departments have been actively promoting the practical exploration of the performance appraisal system, and have made remarkable progress in many aspects. In particular, the importance attached to the performance appraisal work has been generally improved, and a relatively formed appraisal system and assessment methods have been initially formed, and a targeted appraisal index system has been established, which has played an important role in economic and social development and the management of party and government departments.

However, on the whole, the current performance appraisal system of various regions and departments still faces some outstanding problems, such as the low degree of institutionalization and standardization of evaluation, the lack of scientificity and effectiveness of performance appraisal index system, and the inability to fully meet the requirements of high-quality development.

Specifically, although the party and government departments at all levels have established various assessment mechanisms, the assessment work is often multi-faceted, the assessment system is not perfect, and selfish departmentalism is serious. Repeated assessment and multi-head assessment are not uncommon. At the same time, the design of evaluation methods and index system is not scientific enough, with scattered points, wide coverage and many indicators, and the focus of evaluation is not prominent. It emphasizes explicit achievements over hidden achievements, short-term effects over long-term effects, and some evaluation contents are divorced from the reality of grassroots work, which makes it difficult to implement the goal of promoting high-quality development.

In addition, the lack of attention to the results of performance appraisal and the necessary application make the performance appraisal work a mere formality, which makes it difficult to give cadres the due incentive and supervision function, and the phenomenon of "hot" and "cold" is more common. At present, China’s reform has entered a critical period and a deep-water area. The heavy development tasks in various fields and the requirements of institutional reform that strictly control the establishment have made the contradiction between local and grass-roots governments more and more prominent. In the absence of scientific and effective evaluation mechanism, the tasks assigned by higher organizations are often arbitrary, regardless of the actual situation of local and grassroots, and there is a certain bureaucratic tendency; However, subordinate units and grassroots cadres have to engage in formalism in order to complete various tasks under various high-pressure situations of accountability. Some cadres with strong sense of responsibility and hard work can’t get objective and true reflection and embodiment through objective and accurate evaluation, which has dampened their enthusiasm for work to some extent. These problems are universal in some regions and departments.

Therefore, it is quite necessary and urgent to establish a performance appraisal system and a scientific and effective evaluation mechanism to promote high-quality development and further improve and perfect the content and methods of performance appraisal at the current stage.

At present, due to the lack of special laws and perfect evaluation system, the level of institutionalized construction of evaluation is far from meeting the needs of practical development, which leads to a series of adverse consequences such as weak objectivity, standardization and independence of evaluation, unclear responsibilities and purposes of evaluation, difficult implementation of perfect organizational structure and mechanism, prominent subjectivity and randomness of evaluation work, and lack of institutionalized application of evaluation results, which seriously restricts the standardized development of evaluation work.

Performance appraisal is a kind of management activity with strong political, policy and technical characteristics, which is influenced by many factors. It is not only related to the image and reputation of the party and the country, but also related to the working methods and styles of cadres at all levels, and it is also related to the high-quality development of the economy and society and the vital interests of the policy target population. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that the assessment and evaluation work is fully authoritative and serious. In practice, we should attach importance to strengthening institutionalization, standardize the rights and responsibilities of the subject and object of performance appraisal through national laws and administrative regulations, ensure the authenticity and effectiveness of the evaluation information, and implement the performance appraisal.

In view of this, we should start from the shortcomings of the institutionalization of performance appraisal, and introduce relevant laws and regulations as soon as possible, so that the appraisal can operate under a set of clear institutional rules, minimize unnecessary human interference, and effectively improve the institutionalization and standardization of the appraisal work.

The performance appraisal work is not the more types and quantities, the better, but should be scientific and effective on a comprehensive, systematic and accurate basis. At present, the problems of multi-head assessment, various names, too high frequency, repeated assessment, and heavy burden of "facing the examination" at the grassroots level are common problems in the assessment and evaluation work in some places, and they are also outstanding manifestations of formalism bureaucracy at the grassroots level.

In practice, the grass-roots units in counties and townships often have to face all kinds of assessments at the central, provincial and municipal levels, as well as special business assessments of different departments, and each assessment has to submit a variety of materials and data, which often makes the grass-roots units tired. Under the situation that the central government has vigorously rectified formalism and bureaucracy, some assessment items have been streamlined, but more assessments exist in the form of "non-assessment" or in the form of oral documents, and the burden on grassroots has not really been alleviated, and complaints and resistance to assessment work still exist.

Therefore, according to the principle of "fewer exams, better exams and more important exams", we should establish an evaluation system with correct orientation, scientific measures, accurate exams and practical exams, which is simple and effective, and make efforts to solve the problems of multi-head assessment, repeated assessment, cumbersome assessment and useless assessment, so as to effectively reduce the burden of "welcoming evaluation" and "welcoming examination" in grass-roots units.

In practice, we should further clarify and integrate all kinds of subjects of assessment and evaluation. According to the principle of centralization and unification, one or a small number of institutions will undertake the assessment and evaluation responsibilities, and all kinds of assessments at all levels will be brought into a unified comprehensive assessment system, and a long-term mechanism that is scientific and effective will be established to prevent multiple assessments and repeated assessments from the source. At the same time, we should also pay attention to avoid the bad tendency of greatly simplifying the assessment indicators and tasks in order to reduce the assessment burden, and ensure the scientific and effective performance assessment.

Assessment and evaluation work is an important basis for selecting and motivating cadres and a necessary means for supervising and managing cadres. If the results of performance appraisal are not applied to the incentive and accountability of cadres, even if the evaluation mechanism is designed scientifically and effectively, it will lose its practical significance. At present, some localities and departments generally have the problem of insufficient and untimely use of assessment results in the process of assessment and evaluation, which leads to the disconnection between the expected objectives of assessment and the actual results and the loss of seriousness and authority of assessment and evaluation. Therefore, it is necessary to further clarify the responsible subject of the evaluation results, attach importance to strengthening the application of the evaluation results, make the accountability of discipline have a basis and support, establish an effective incentive mechanism for cadres based on scientific evaluation, and stimulate the internal motivation of cadres to act as entrepreneurs.

First of all, we should feedback the assessment results in time. On the basis of clarifying the responsibilities of organizational performance and personal work performance, feedback the performance evaluation results to the leading bodies and cadres at all levels in a practical way through individual talks, work briefings and meetings, affirming achievements, pointing out shortcomings, conducting pressure and stimulating motivation. Secondly, it is necessary to combine the results of cadre assessment with the selection and appointment of cadres. The assessment results of peacetime assessment, annual assessment, special assessment and term assessment will be effectively integrated as an important reference for the selection and appointment of cadres, and the enthusiasm of cadres will be fully stimulated and mobilized. Finally, it is necessary to combine the assessment results of cadres with the incentive mechanism. Establish and improve the reward and punishment system for assessment results, adhere to the combination of material incentives and spiritual incentives, and adhere to the unity of positive incentives and enhanced accountability, so as to effectively encourage the advanced and spur the backward, and encourage cadres to take responsibility.

Scientific and effective evaluation index is the core and key of performance evaluation system, and it is the lifeline to ensure the accurate and scientific performance evaluation of cadres. Since the beginning of the new century, the practical research on cadre performance evaluation has been gradually enriched and deepened, and the construction of index system has been continuously promoted. However, the immature evaluation model and basic technical route have become the main factors restricting the development of local government performance evaluation practice. This mainly shows that the government’s self-evaluation is too strong, the objectivity and openness of evaluation are weak, and there is a lack of explanatory performance evaluation index system design; The setting of indicators is unscientific and unsystematic, which often confuses comprehensive performance, departmental performance, personnel performance and policy performance. The formation of indicator system is mostly the extraction and arrangement of work indicators, which is random, changeable and different, and lacks the professional theoretical support of scientific system; At the same time, the rigidity of government performance structure design is obvious, and the room for performance improvement and evaluation incentive function are limited; Wait a minute. Therefore, it is extremely necessary to strengthen the research on performance evaluation index system and build a scientific, effective and standardized basic technical route for evaluation, which is also an important direction for further improvement of cadre performance evaluation in the future.

The informatization construction of performance appraisal is the key link to carry out government performance appraisal. In order to improve the scientific and accurate assessment, we should pay more attention to the application of new technologies such as big data in the construction of cadre performance assessment system. The advent of the era of big data provides a rare opportunity to reshape the performance appraisal model.

On the one hand, the quality of performance evaluation will be higher. In the era of big data, having the scale, activity and explanatory ability of data will become an important part of performance evaluation ability. Possession and control of data will help to innovate the performance evaluation model and become a key factor to improve the quality of government performance evaluation. Through data trace and cluster analysis, the results of government performance evaluation will be more accurate and detailed. On the other hand, the efficiency of performance evaluation will be higher. Big data is good at processing massive data, unstructured data and real-time data. It can process data with more than one million dimensions in a short time and at high speed, and make the data dynamically displayed visually, which greatly improves the efficiency and timeliness of government performance evaluation, thus improving the problems of data lag and low evaluation efficiency in traditional government performance evaluation. This makes the government performance evaluation more comprehensive and objective, reduces the dependence on traditional government performance data, greatly enhances the independence of evaluation, and has epoch-making significance for reshaping the model of cadre performance evaluation.

Generally speaking, building scientific and effective assessment techniques and methods, paying attention to the role of professional third-party assessment organizations, gradually introducing new technical means such as big data, and comprehensively strengthening the institutionalization, specialization and standardization of cadre performance assessment will be the inevitable trend of future development, and the only way to improve the scientific and effective performance assessment system of cadres and promote high-quality economic and social development.

The above is slightly abridged

From | National Governance Weekly

Original title | Scientific and effective evaluation index system is the lifeline of cadre performance evaluation

Author | Qi Jie, researcher of the Institute of Political Science, China Academy of Social Sciences and director of the administrative management research office.

New Media Editor | Wang SinanOriginal Editor | He Shenglan/Si Wenjun