It's year end and the buzz around "performance reviews" have started at my company.
Everyone I have talked to, including managers, and higher-ups see this as a useless chore to get done. No one seems to look forward to it.
My own experience in this over the 2 decades that I have been subject to this has been mixed. I have had great years where I got a lot done, but the review was average/mixed and my manager seemed to look for things he could complain about, hence ruining the review. I have had some years which were plain vanilla, nothing great, but the reviews have come out stellar leaving me perplexed. Even I didn't think I was that good!
I read somewhere that Performance reviews are a vestige of the industrial era. In those days you had to produce 100 widgets a day and they could accurately rate your performance. How does one accurately and fairly rate a knowledge worker that many people are today? If I had to manage a project, I can talk about how well I did it, but the manager can pick and choose negative things to highlight if they wanted to.
In an earlier company, much smaller, they didn't even get to setting goals for the year, and in December, they just asked us to write what we did all year and that became "goals". Goals are supposed to be forward looking.
How do you even set goals for the year? Things change so much in today's world. If at the start of the year, your goals say "Do Project X" and X gets canceled and you are asked to do Y, what happens to your goals? This is very common in today's fast moving world.
Performance Reviews today for most jobs are merely a tool for managers to fix their employees. If they like them, and it could be because they kiss their asses or have the hots for, they can give a good rating. If they dislike them or feel insecure or hate their race/religion, they can screw them and try to get them fired. It is a legal way for managers to be biased and in most places employees have no recourse. I have had a manager once who fraudulently added an item to my review late in the process and graded me poorly on it.
It seems like HR doesn't have much to do, so they have concocted a complex review process to keep themselves relevant.
It is 2018, Isn't it time to find a better way?
Everyone I have talked to, including managers, and higher-ups see this as a useless chore to get done. No one seems to look forward to it.
My own experience in this over the 2 decades that I have been subject to this has been mixed. I have had great years where I got a lot done, but the review was average/mixed and my manager seemed to look for things he could complain about, hence ruining the review. I have had some years which were plain vanilla, nothing great, but the reviews have come out stellar leaving me perplexed. Even I didn't think I was that good!
I read somewhere that Performance reviews are a vestige of the industrial era. In those days you had to produce 100 widgets a day and they could accurately rate your performance. How does one accurately and fairly rate a knowledge worker that many people are today? If I had to manage a project, I can talk about how well I did it, but the manager can pick and choose negative things to highlight if they wanted to.
In an earlier company, much smaller, they didn't even get to setting goals for the year, and in December, they just asked us to write what we did all year and that became "goals". Goals are supposed to be forward looking.
How do you even set goals for the year? Things change so much in today's world. If at the start of the year, your goals say "Do Project X" and X gets canceled and you are asked to do Y, what happens to your goals? This is very common in today's fast moving world.
Performance Reviews today for most jobs are merely a tool for managers to fix their employees. If they like them, and it could be because they kiss their asses or have the hots for, they can give a good rating. If they dislike them or feel insecure or hate their race/religion, they can screw them and try to get them fired. It is a legal way for managers to be biased and in most places employees have no recourse. I have had a manager once who fraudulently added an item to my review late in the process and graded me poorly on it.
It seems like HR doesn't have much to do, so they have concocted a complex review process to keep themselves relevant.
It is 2018, Isn't it time to find a better way?
