Subjective skills matrix

I work in a team of people whose jobs are changing and there will only be six new jobs for 14 people.

There was a skills matrix for redundancy last year and I came third top out of 15 people. The company is now saying that is all in the past, it does not form any part of our employment record and they want to do a new skills matrix. The employer is correct. They would be very foolish to include or consdier a scoring mechanism which took place a year or more ago. Decisions which may have been made about redundancy in the past are not relevant.

My argument is that following the matrix last year I asked (twice) for an appraisal and as they failed to give me one that 2009 matrix is a snapshot of my working life at that time because there are no other company documents which have measured my capabilities and achievements in the last 20 years. I am afraid that your argument holds no weight at all. An employer does not have to conduct appraisals, whether you want one or whether it is good practice or not. A redundancy exrecise conducted a year ago is nota performance document and the employer would be foolish to attempt to use it as one.

I want it taken into account because if I am scored lower on the new matrix I want to be able to ask why nobody has ever discussed with me the alleged decline in my performance over the last year. I need to be able to show that my performance was excellent last year. There is no comparison between matrices. What you scored last year is what you scored on those criterialast year. Scoring lower this year does not mean that there has been any performance decline - this matric may be different and use different criteria (which is allowed) and score different people. What "your performance" was last year has no relevance - it is now that counts.

The new matrix includes some things which are not measurable like communication and interpersonal skills, personal effectiveness and motivation, flexibility open to change, job knowledge, quality of work, sickness and disciplinary record. In what way are these not measurable. I measure my staff in appraisals by all these crietria all the time! I find no difficulty in measuring them and they are certainly not subjective. Provided that the method for scoring these are objective and fairly applied on an equal basis to all staff these criteria are not only fine - they are common place

I am very unhappy about this because basically how can you challenge something which is unmeasurable. Nobody would know if I was open to change because they have never discussed that with me but they are going to score me on it. You seem to assume that your managers cannot assess these things without discussing them with you directly. They can. It is relatively easy to assess how motivated an employee is, how open they are to change, etc. What you say is far less relevant than how you exhibit these characteristics on a day to day basis

Can I insist on the skills matrix from 2009 being put into my HR file as I believe it is a very important document and surely it must be covered by data protection law? No you cannot insist - and what on earth do you think data protection has to do with this? Data protection is about safegurading your data - not about whether it is in your HR file or not.I was told by HR they still have them, "they are in a cupboard or filing cabinet somewhere."
Thanks so much for any replies.
Mike

I am getting the feeling that you believe that you are going to be selected this time. Is there a reason that you might feel this way? But in the end, nothing you have said here shows the employer doing anything wrong. You have the right to be scored objectively now alongside your colleagues, and a fair decision reached. You don't have any right to demand that they score certain things and not others, or include previous scores from previous exrecises. If you can show unfairness in the application of the process, or a breach of the law in the process, then that matters - but what you want to happen isn't something the employer has to agree to.

I have no confidence in the process as last year they awarded high marks on a skills matrix to a colleague who had never done a particular job (never even been trained on it!), while someone who did the job regularly got very low marks and lost his job.