It’s that time of the year for me, writing page after page of comments and ratings on whether I’ve shown good teamwork, and leadership, and my strengths and weaknesses etc. Every year the process seems to get more bloated.
And for what?
It’s essentially the same boring shit you need to write for applying for a new job, except without the benefit of a new job at the end of it*.
Who reads it? No-one cares. Ultimately there’s only one thing that matters and it’s whether your boss thinks you’re good at your job overall which is hardly a surprise to you and is not something they’ve thought about enough to break down into categories.
I guess I particularly soured to this process after working one job where I really didn’t get along with my boss.
I spent a while on my appraisal documents giving specific examples of where I showed leadership or solved difficult problems etc. And he would just put a generic comment of “needs improvement” or whatever, and a low score, even for things where I was objectively the office expert.
So what was the point? Was it a court case where some impartial observer would rule me right, and him wrong?
* Yes, I guess there are potential benefits to the process: you could mention a specific career goal and your manager could put you on that track. So in that sense you get a new job.
This pitting isn’t to say all appraisals need to be thrown out, but the process could do with a lot of streamlining and remove a lot of the generic feelings stuff that no-one seems to care about.
You’d be surprised. I’ve got 2 who are totally delusional not only about my estimation of them but also about how good they really are (they’re nowhere near ‘industry leading’ if that gives a clue).
That was all true at my former job. How and what you did over the last year? Pffft, all that mattered there was “How does the boss feel about you right now?”
(Notice I said “feel”, not “think”? It was well known around the office as “Mood of the Moment Management”).
So one year I pulled up my previous year’s Self-Assessment doc, find/replaced dates and names of projects, and turned it in. I remember thinking “Well, that was a waste of 90 seconds… but better that than 90 minutes.”
When my review came, the boss pulled it out of my file, waved it around, said “Now, I’ve read this closely…” and buried it back in the file folder. There was no way he could’ve even glanced at it, given his subsequent comments.
I always hated self-reviews. I’ve had them at a few organizations I’ve worked at, and they were always awkward.
Where I work now, I have annual performance reviews but I’m just the recipient of them, and fortunately they have always gone well. They always boil down to, “Great job, keep it up!” And say, “Okay!” Basically, I sit there and try not to feel self-conscious about the praise, and then sign it.
This is what I always do. FFS, they make us do it quarterly! Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Plus I had to evaluate a superior. I gave him the best rating straight through, and threw in a couple of "not applicable"s for the questions where I couldn’t even figure out what they were asking. Done and done.
Where I am, annual appraisals are tied to monetary bonuses which get sent out two weeks after Thanksgiving. Or not sent, if one’s appraisal is “satisfactory” or worse.
Then there are security clearances; I’ll likely have to go through another round of background checks in a couple of years and at least one of my references is no longer readily available.
My gripe is that my company splits everything up into separate categories, when really, they overlap. Leadership is its category, ethics is its category, communication is its category, accountability is its own, performance is its own, etc. How do I write several paragraphs about each?
I would much prefer it if they just combined it all into one and said “Write 5 paragraphs about your work this past year.”
Yeah, and it’s still the managers “pets” who get all the big bonuses/raises. I’ve always hated doing reviews – especially after they began being just me, as the employee, writing the entire damn thing, and the supervisor/manager just adding a few comments. Why am I doing your work.
For a time at my former job, we had an incredibly complex employee review process…there were something like 70-80 questions in which the boss had to rate each employee. Then when it was finished, the software went through some sort of grading process, which then spit out the percentage of raise (if any) that the employee should receive.
I, as a supervisor, soon learned how to tweak it so the answer was the raise percentage that I had in mind for each employee. Each review, however, took more than an hour. When I had 12 direct reports, it took me the better part of a weekend to complete the process.
Whoa boy, have I had experience with this. The owners were so cheap that supervisors were told the company had ZERO budget to give raises with. So the Big Boss would hold your review, browbeat you with the tiniest mistakes that someone in your department made, all so he could say “I can’t with a clear conscience give you a raise this year. Maybe next year if you can fix these grave mistakes…”
My favorite example of “say anything to keep the workers down” was when I brought up that I’d been coming in early and staying late (to meet impossible deadlines that HE’d promised clients!), and I’d put in 65-80+ hours of billable time each week for the last month.
His comment “I have a hard time believing that. I haven’t seen you here early or late…” NO kidding! You roll in ten-ish and leave right at five! How would you see me busting my butt?
(Whoa, just now realized that he must have believed my time sheets… he had no problem billing my 80 hours to the clients!)
I hated having to do that. I eventually started recycling my self-eval every few years. The boss never noticed. And for the official eval that would go in my file, she would just copy/paste what I said about myself, changing it to her voice.
I hate them. And where I work, they’re pretty much meaningless when it comes to getting a raise or promotion.
The government folks I work with have to do a “CCS” a couple times a year. From what they tell me, it sounds horrible; a lot worse than what I have to go through.
I took a management course once taught by Harvard Business School professors. The one who was an expert on appraisals told me that every company hated the system they were using and changed to a new one, which they then hated also. In a few years they’d cycle back to the first one.
There is a reason for writing up the stuff you do, which is when your boss hasn’t a clue about what you did for the year. I used to be on a committee to improve our system when I was at Bell Labs, and more than one person told us that they got dinged for not doing stuff they did. So we had a requirement that before the multilevel appraisal each person met with their manager and went over their accomplishments, and got to sign off saying they met. The manager got to put down comments. If a manager came without signed copies, they got in trouble. All the other managers of the department got a book with all the appraisals (a big one) so we could compare the story with reality. In my department it worked pretty well.
Now, if you have the modern system where 80% of employees are treated the same and get a little raise or none at all, to save the money for the stars, then the whole appraisal process is a waste of time. If the second level manager “knows” who should win and who should lose, ditto. I’ve been in some horrible appraisal meetings also. In those systems doing the minimum makes perfect sense.
I have to do the same every six months. I have been copying and pasting the text from the first one into each new one for 12 years. No one has noticed. I still get my raises.
Way back when at the company I worked at, the appraisal system was tied to raises, and the CFO signed off on all the raises. Guess who got the larges percentage raise every year? Guess, c’mon, give it a shot! If you guessed that the (male) CFO’s very hot (female) assistant got the largest percentage raise every year (based on performance), you would be correct. I know this because I maintained the compensation, and salary increase system.
To be fair, there has to be some way to evaluate the effectiveness of staff. But it seems that nobody has invented a method that really works.
As a Director I had 6 managers reporting to me. We went through the self evaluation thing once a year, but I required terse responses to limit the effort. Interestingly, the result had a reverse gradient. The worst manager rated himself the highest. I also required that each manager review me using the same form. That produced some of the most insightful evaluations I’ve ever had.
My philosophy is boiled down to two words: “minimal compliance”. Both going up the hierarchy and going down. If someone complains, ask would you rather I be doing internal paperwork or external billable work?
The one thing I hate about this - if the company has a new idea - call it Banana elbow - people will jump through hoops to show that what they did contributes to Banana elbow.
If I had my druthers, a performance review would look like this:
In the past year:
What did you do that you are most proud of?
What did you do that you learned the most from?
What do you consider your greatest failure? (May overlap with #2)
If there was one thing you could do to improve what we do, what would it be?
And - is there anything you’d like to take on as a task?
And the answer(s) to #3 could not be - It was THEIR fault.