Well, its that time of the year again where I work. Time for self-evaluations. I really hate these things, as they have a listing of categories and you choose one of three things:
Does not meet expectations
Meets expectations.
Exceeds expectations
For the life of me, I’ve never understood how this works. “Exceeds expectations”. How is that even possible? I expect myself to give 100% effort in every project I work on. There’s really only two possibilities, meet or don’t meet.
For the people that have “Exceeds expectations” down the board, are they not expecting to give 100% effort and are pleasantly surprised when they do?
Is management really trying to teach me to set my expectations lower so that I have the chance to exceed them?
“Yeah, I know I was hired for 40 hours a week, but I’m putting my expectations down for actually working 20 hours a week. I’ll spend the other 20 hours just hanging around the coffee room talking.”
At my old job, we had to fill out those evaluations in a bunch of different categories, and one of them was Compliance. It was not clear at all how we were expected to Exceed Expectations in Compliance. I was always tempted to leap up and shout at one of my co-workers:
“You are in violation of Article 1 of the Clean Desk Policy. Remove those papers from your desk immediately. You have 30 seconds to comply!!”
Oh yeah, my old company had a scale like that. But it was, incredibly, worse; there was even a choice for “significantly exceeds expectations.”
There are problems with the model even when someone else is rating you; you can’t exceed expectations several years in a row because the expectation baseline keeps ratcheting up based what he/she previously observes. By year five you’ll have to complete your reports in 7 seconds to exceed expectations again.
The last year I was in the Navy, the preferred buzzword in evaluations was “singularly responsible” - it was interesting how many of my squadron mates were singularly responsible for our outstanding deployment. :rolleyes:
My last job didn’t ask us to score ourselves on self-evals, but we were expected to brag on ourselves, if only to remind the boss of the good stuff we during the year. But it would have been possible to say “Exceeds expectations” if, for example, you were asked to provide a report within a week and you had it done in 2 days. It indicated that you not only did what you were supposed to do, but you were able to anticipate what the boss would want - always a good thing.
I kept a running list as I finished projects - a summary of what I did, including how quickly and accurately I provided what the boss wanted. That way, I wasn’t wracking my brain trying to recall what I’d done 10 months earlier. It only took me 30+ years to figure that one out. Then again, it took over 30 years to get a boss who did honest-to-goodness evaluations with honest-to-goodness feedback. He’s the only thing I miss about that job.
It could be that the “expectation” really is that you are allowed to have up to X compliance problems per year and that it is unacceptable to have more than X. If you are allowed 5 compliance writeups per year and you only have 2, then maybe you exceeded expectations. The problem with this is that no company will put a statement in the employee handbook that employees are permitted to violate policy as long as they don’t do it more often than some benchmark.
And there is another problem with defining the very nature of what it means to meet or exceed expectations. Sometimes you will hear the old management garbage that “All employees are expected to exceed expectations”. Well, if everyone is expected to exceed expectations and just meeting them marks you for termination, then the “expectations” aren’t really the actual expectations! When you think like that you end up with a fundamental confusion as to what the expectations really are. I didn’t meet the expectations because while I met the expectations I didn’t exceed them. Bill barely met the expectations because while he exceeded the expectations, he only exceeded them by 5.1% and all employees are expected to exceed them by 5% as a baseline expectation. Jane didn’t meet the expectations because even though she exceeded the expectations, she only exceeded them by 2% and the expectation was that she would exceed them by 5%.
As far as “Exceeding Expectations” is concerned, I don’t believe they mean your expectations, but rather theirs. For example, if their expectation is you will produce 15 widgets per hour, even if you know that a one-armed monkey should be able to do 25, if you do 20, you’re exceeding their expectations. If you are to make 20 collection calls per day and you do 30, same thing. If you have goals that are quantitative, is should be easy to measure. If your goals aren’t as spelled out, it’s a bit more difficult. If it’s being collaborative and you assisted 5 different departments when most employees never help anyone but themselves to the first piece of office Birthday cake, I’d say you were exceeding expectations.
I don’t view this as rating what I’m capable of doing. I view it as rating what my job asks me to do, and what they compensate me for doing. I’m paid at a level to have --> <-- this much responsibility. Due to circumstances, I ended up having --> <-- this much responsibility instead, and handled it. That exceeds the companies expectations, and this is a means to reward me for it.
Yes, it was less stupid than it sounds, considering that it was a bank and the bank had a Compliance department (which refers to complying with various regulations, like anti-money laundering laws or the U.N. Suppression of Terrorism resolution). But the stupid part was that (a) it was rare that people in my group would interact with that group and (b) you weren’t allowed to just leave it blank. So if you have no opportunities to interact with Compliance, does that mean you met expectations? Or exceeded expectation? Or did not meet expectations? How high is up?
Lord help you if you get a promotion at the end of the year - as you will then be evaluated/ranked against your new peers in your new level, and all the work you did in the old level now barely meets expectations for your new level.
In the last self evaluation I was asked to fill out I gave myself the highest rating in all categories. I figured that if the management of the company was unable to gauge my contribution and needed my help in doing so then I was already working above their level.
When chastised for my evaluation I said, “Whatever the bonus and/or raise range the company guidelines provided, I deserve the maximum. I was just filling out the form to insure that there would be no chance of that a method would keep me from getting what I deserve.”
Not a self evaluation but the 3 step rating is familiar.
The company I worked at for about 30 years was owned by a major corporation for the middle 10 years, as a small division of this huge corporation, essentially a small company within.
The corp. had an A, B, C, annual management employee performance rating system. A was something like ‘excellent’, B ‘meets or exceeds’, and C was some version of ‘needs improvement.’
There were only about a dozen of us middle managers and we were fairly entrenched in our positions and had been working as a team for a long time. When the time came to meet with our bosses to go over this evaluation the meeting always went something like "hey Dallas, sit down, it’s time for your annual ‘B’, did you see the game last night? And we would spend 10 minutes shooting the breeze. Everybody got a B.
Why? Because if an A was given then the upper manager had to come up with a detailed plan of how they were going to develop you as a corporate asset. If someone deserved a C then they were probably already fired. If not, a similar plan had to be developed to mentor this employee. So it was B for everyone. The upper managers were not going to get into all that extra work for an already cohesive team.
This only lasted a few years before our Japanese overlords figured out it wasn’t going to work there and sent us a couple interns to learn what we were doing.