And this is why I'm an IT contractor
My appraisal process is easy. If they like me I get renewed. If they like me a lot or are scared of me going I get renewed with a rate-rise.
Anonymous Coward, obviously...
An inescapable and widely dreaded fact of life for people employed in the financial industry is the annual review. Unlike the way this process might have worked a few decades ago, and still does in most other industries, it’s not a simple matter of sitting down with your manager at the end of the year for a casual discussion of …
It's not so much different on the "permie" side of the fence. Seems we now have an annual redundancy process, and if you make it through that, you can assume you did okay on your annual appraisal. Of course, zero expectation of a bonus in the spring - if the firm was making any money they wouldn't have had to have the redundancies.
Anon, for the same reasons...
Totally agree - I used to contract and I saw the pain permies went through year on year at various companies, it was sorrowful. As a contractor the best bit was that I didn't have to care about all that
And it worked well for management as well - they didn't have to appraise my character, team play, and a load of other impossible to quantify vectors, and write paragraphs about them, they just signed a sheet every month and I showed up again the next month. They loved it, frankly so did I.
Mr Edwards Demming - the man who got the Japanese industries going after WWII - in his profound cleverness said, "Annual reviews are bullshit" (shortened and refined somewhat).
He said, (more or less) that Annual Reviews are just total fucking mental illness gone haywire.
http://deming.org/
Some of these videos are parts of series - but they are worth downloading as a higher quality video and studying much.
Much better than all these fucking morons in management.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehMAwIHGN0Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67B1DZlDTF4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MJ3lGJ4OFo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfkQHEBYJjk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jc5fDsgVw0
I agree, one of the big advantages of contracting is avoiding the monkey-wank of the annual review.
Two of the sickest cos' I have worked in also had the most broken annual review schemes.
The first one was the use of the "annual bonus pot", a fixed percentage of profits was allocated for the annual bonus thereby creating the manager mentality that the less I give to you the more there is for me. My experience of that was a manager who would ask if their pet project X implemented yet, to be told that it hadn't because projects A B C D E and F had highest priority (usually the roll out of service pack to address critical problems). The manager then goes to managers meeting and announces that employee is holding up project X. No bonus for employee. When I announced I was leaving I started hearing other horror stories like the employee who was refused a bonus because they didn't do enough unpaid overtime. The reason that the employee didn't do any overtime was because they the only person in the section capable of doing their days work within a normal working day. Company eventually went tits up.
Company two allocated bonuses according to the dreaded bell curve. To score a 4 and be eligible for a bonus you had "exceed all your targets", Exceed only 99.999999999% of your targets, well that not all so no bonus again, but I did consistently score what managers call a "high 3" whatever that is, it's still not a 4. Still I'm glad I never scored a 4 because it meant that somebody else didn't have to get a 2 to to keep the bell curve balanced.
And managers wonder why the plebs are cynical of the review process?????
I stated to my manager that I was buying myself out of the process.
He said that wasn't an option, that there was no process for buying out of the process, that it was the only way to get a raise, etc.
I told him the annual raise that I wasn't going to get would be what I'd use to buy myself out.
Got him, and the HR department, in a right old tiz.
Thoroughly enjoyable experience, that was.
I tried that and the management and HR went completely froot loop. Then went barmy 'cos their bonuses were calculated on the percentage of completed assessments. It got as far as being threatened with written warnings but I held out as they could not actually sack me. What spoilt the management attempts to get me to take part was their reluctance acceptance that the whole assessment process was an utter waste of time for anything except to get the percentage figures up.
Course they didnt know that I was going to hand my notice in with a couple of months
As someone needing to keep stuff going all year round as a sysadmin I consider an anual review completely and utterly pointless... And I have stated this to my manager this year when I had it. After sleeping on it she actually agree on it. If I wasn't doing my work stuff wouldn't be working and it would be blatantly obvious. So for me it now really is a nice chat with a few forms to copy from last year and adjust some things.
They seem to have crept into management positions like fungus and all seem to come armed with the conviction that if they have a number for something, they have an understanding of it and they're managing it. So everything is reduced to a number, whether it's implicitly numerical or not.
Classic examples from my past: assessment grades based on whether or not 'objectives' were missed badly, missed, met, exceeded, exceeded impressively. And then an objective that had a 100% requirement to meet, like 'fills in time sheet every week'. And an annual pay rise that depended on a significant number of 'exceeded' or 'impressively' grades. Or objectives to do a certain number of training courses, the funding and the time for which were assigned (hah!) by someone other than me and beyond my control.
I think I refused to accept the appraisal five years on the trot.
>>All the “exceeds expectations” rankings this person had received were lowered to “fails to meet expectations<<
I've seen that situation; someone changed the definitions to show a below acceptable score resulting in the person being fired. However, the person had managed to keep a paper copy of all of the forms; these were handed to a legal advisor. Once the company had received a letter detailing the exact information and realised they had been caught out, they quickly agreed to a very handsome settlement out of court. The person concerned is now quite happily enjoying an early retirement with many years still to go and no need to ever work again. (And it was someone working in HR!)
The review process should be a very valuable way of motivating staff; sadly, we have too many PHBs that know bugger all apart from what bonus they should be getting.
".... someone changed the definitions to show a below acceptable score resulting in the person being fired....." I was once asked to "find something we can fire that guy on" and refused as it was constructive dismissal. The guy concerned (who was simply a pr*ck rather than being incompetant) left soon after of his own accord, someone having (allegedly) pointed out to him it was probably better to find another berth.
you (the author) obviously had bad experiences. every goal has to be numerically measurable, without any subjective points. I find them beneficial, if you don't need to spend more than 1 day per year with your own review. I agree though the these reviews are a weapon when needing the fire somebody in a company with a strong work union.
Some companies though need to line the goals of that employee at the beginning of the year (sales: sell so much; research: take that and that course to be compliant and be allowed to work).
Also these discussions are also used to help the employee find her way in the professional life, if done properly.
When we went into our appraisal meetings they'd already decided our pay-rise and bonus. By 2008 they were already assigning departments a "quota" of how many 1-5 they could have. Our department was told we couldn't have any 5s, so the best you could hope for was a 4. That was motivating.
As a line manager but not a departmental head it was doubly frustrating, as I got told by my manager what grades to assign to each member of my team, regardless of what was actually written on their appraisals. We spent half the appraisal meeting talking about this and how I was going to break this to my team. Needless to say, I got killed when I did my appraisal meetings with my team.
Unsurprisingly, we all left RBS within about a year of each other.
"When we went into our appraisal meetings they'd already decided our pay-rise and bonus. By 2008 they were already assigning departments a "quota" of how many 1-5 they could have....." Saw something similar when contracting at a non-financial a few years earlier. What was worse was the managers' scores were largely based on savings made on their departmental budget, and since training and pay came out of the departmental budget it was in the managers' own interests to restrict payrises and ensure the reviews did not highlight any requirements for training. It was a sure-fire way to drive the good staff out of the company and I picked up two of them as contractors at my next gig.
I agree though that these reviews are a weapon when needing the fire somebody in a company with a strong work union
No, no, no. You live in cloud cuckoo land, sorry. It's a weapon for a company which doesn't like paying redundancy. If they can engineer a bad performance review for you, they can dismiss you without that unwanted impact on their bonus pool. To cloak what is happening, they usually have some "performance improvement" process which means you get to report so often and so detailed you are actually not in a position to do your wrk properly.
I'm not sure if you could suggest companies to inspect, but if there is a government department that could investigate this sort of activity (for instance, to establish eligibility for government work) I know where I could point them. Plenty of witnesses.
I have a project. If I do the project on time and to a good standard we're done. Maybe I'll get another, maybe I won't, maybe I'll take it, maybe I won't. Maybe I'll raise my rates, maybe I won't.
But there's no bullshit appraisal based on management opinions. There's no writing down your useless goals for the year which are irrelevant a month later, never mind a year later when you have to try and twist what you actually did into a narrative that somehow supports what you said you were going to do, despite the fact those goals were discarded ages ago and you did an awesome job on whatever the hell else it was you were doing but somehow that might not count because it doesn't align with the agreed targets and anyway you haven't been engaging with the wider company and perhaps we can push for a little more leadership training in the next period and would you like to write an article for the staff news letter next month and by the way we've got an all-hands staff meeting this afternoon that's going to take three hours but be entirely content free because the visiting that exec has mastered the art of saying long strings of vaguely encouraging sounding words without conveying anything close to what might be considered a fact, factoid or piece of information in them......
Bugger all that for a lark.
I can definitively say, that it is simply the biggest load of bullshit. For two months of the year, there is intense focus on "reviews", and the number of reviews that one has to do can vary from 10-30 reviews (other people's in addition to your own.)
Most end up being a cut-and-paste job, and really, if you want to stitch someone up, it's the perfect way to do it (I know, I got stitched up* - and by that point, it's too late to do anything about it.) I really see no point in them, if your manager sees what you do day in day out, why is a written essay required to re-highlight your activities throughout the year. It's for this and budgeting that middle management exists because once the reviews are done, the next activity that keeps them busy is budgeting.
It's great if you are a junior though, means those without a clue stay out of your hair for about half of the year.
* - not sour at all about it, got a nice little pay-off when I was made redundant...
My experience is that no matter how well you do by the time the bonus pot gets to the IT boys its all spent!
Promotions, well only if you are cut from the same cloth as those cloned middle managers and none of us really are. Besides do you want middle management promotion? Doubt it you only want the reward for you skills.
I am still kicking myself for being such a fool thinking if I worked like a dog I would be rewarded. The good thing is I noticed my mistake after a few years and switched to contracting..
You work hard, produce the goods and they like you, you get renewed. Simple for everyone.
this isn't just the finance industry... it's anywhere where bright young MBAs have a hand in management through business books.
as a former employee of the company that brought you Vista I can report it's out of control and tearing the company apart. Not only the mindless paperwork involved, the peer rating and 360 reviews and the mid-year check-in but you overlay that on a dog eat dog forced curve stackrank where survival depends on you not being in the bottom 10% and any chance of a bonus means you have to be at least in the median group ... and they wonder why morale is shot to hell?
Sure, you need a way of evaluating and appraising individuals and teams, especially in a large organization but having the process turn into a driving factor for decision making (can I send out a self congratulatory email if I do X) means you stop focussing on your customers and start competing with your peers...
"where survival depends on you not being in the bottom 10% and any chance of a bonus means you have to be at least in the median group ... and they wonder why morale is shot to hell?"
But the beatings must continue till the morale improves.
Do you think that management might have lost sight of the purpose of all this?
According to author Daniel Kahneman (Nobel price in Economics) in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, perceived "performance" in the financial industry is all an illusion based on random factors. So don't worry about those reviews, it's just a roll of the dice anyway. :)
We're in the middle of it at the moment. This year though our goals and aspirations are apparently not relevant. It appears that they want us to say what we did well and what we'd do better.
I'm a programmer. I wrote code. I hope to..um..write more code?
Oh and one group says it shouldn't take longer than fifteen minutes and another tells me I've not put enough detail in.
"I'm a programmer. I wrote code. I hope to..um..write more code?"
But imagine this conversation.
"boss. John (moustache twitching) we've noticed you use structured constructs in your code"
"me That's what we were taught to use in the latest version of the language"
"boss. We normally use GOTO's for compatibility with the old machine"
"me. Err right. If then else bad, GOTO good."
"boss.OK then, carry on."
This is neither an UL nor a funny story. It happened in the early 90's.
IMHO, performance is a direct function of good team building and leading.
I am almost aggressively opposed to people calling this management - to me, management is for kit, not for people. If you want a group of people to do something you LEAD them. You assemble the right skills (and the right budget to support it) with a degree of overlap, and then you tune the people until they work as a team. It tends to take a bit of time, also because new team members have to learn to trust you, but you *know* when you get it right because the resulting energy almost keeps the lights on by itself.
At that point you can practically perform miracles with the team. People will come to work eager to contribute, problems genuinely turn into team challenges (not because calling it a "challenge" is an MBA trick to avoid bad news) and I personally had to throw peopel out in the evening because they would have worked overnight (your job MUST be to protect "your* people from harm as well - otherwise you don't deserve their trust).
I have had the pleasure of doing this a few times as contractor, and it's the job I love best. It only produces winners, but it does take someone with a spine to remain a human being and not an accountant..
When I saw the bell curving over and over again, with scores from 1-4 being the only allowed scores out of 5 being normalised and marked against other bell curved and normalised and blahblah numbers... well it was immediately obvious that the best that could eventually happen was a score between 2 and 3 out of 5, when those subjecting you to these bell curves were somehow outside the tedious process themselves and just took a healthy rise for being so clever...
"noo I didnt get a badge...." Well, just like the appraisal systems under discussion, El Reg Badge Bonanza is just another system to be gamed. I couldn't possibly suggest you go create 100 throw-away email addresses at Gmail and similar sites, and then create 100 El Reg accounts, and then give yourself 100 upvotes to get the Ultimate El Reg Shiny! That would be cheating.
"" Well, just like the appraisal systems under discussion, El Reg Badge Bonanza is just another system to be gamed. I couldn't possibly suggest you go create 100 throw-away email addresses at Gmail and similar sites, and then create 100 El Reg accounts, and then give yourself 100 upvotes to get the Ultimate El Reg Shiny! "
But if it's so easy why do you want it?
Also it might have something to do with the ratio of downvotes to upvotes . A 100% approval rating is very unlikely and some saddo is probably using some sort of down voting script already.
While it's not quite as bad where I work, I did become gradually more nauseated as I trawled through the blatant Dilbertesque HR spew until I came to the following "soft goal" gem that made me need to walk away from my review form:
"... tenaciously working to meet or exceed goals while deriving satisfaction from that achievement and continuous improvement."
Paging Catbert, paging Catbert . . .
I disagree. There is a point beyond which it no longer produces value for the company (the only metric that counts IMHO). If the process soaks up man hours but does not lead to business improvement you need to start taking it apart.
I've come to doubt the whole HR function at times. In one company I worked they were just a club of reprobates who were there to facilitate rapid ejection of people without causing any legal problems, usually just before the company bonus pool got calculated. They had a collection of the vilest tricks I have seen used on people, so I was very entertained that a friend of mine managed to get one arrested because he tried to keep him in a room until he signed an objectionable bit of paper.
In another company they were given the job to find a security manager. By pure chance (and their mismanagement) I ended up with their pile of rejected CVs. I found the absolute PERFECT man for the job in that pile, but the CV had a fat NO scribbled over it. When I enquired I was told that the HR person thought "he would not fit into the culture". Thew HR out of the process, got the guy in and he got hired on the spot - and did a good job for years until he outgrew the role.
It's about people. The moment we forget this we're losing.
When I werked in an investment bank, 50% of the staff would move, mostly to another bank, during a year. I left after 6 months. Is the rate higher or lower in 2012? If staff are that mobile, do they really get caught by appraisals? Doesn't appraisal time signal that it's time to move to the next employer?
Just ask a bunch of people (random sample) and see how many feel they are "above average". The number is almost always over 50%. So, to get "above average" people, you need some "below average" people, because that is how it works.
Life is like that. We can't all be above average, much as we try.
An exercise: Go look at job descriptions and see just how many want "rock star" or similar type people. Sorry, but the pool is limited, so you get what you are given. That's the way it works, good, or bad. Deal with it!
Now back to the end of year stuff.........
This certainly isn't the preserve of the financial world, I'd hazard a guess and say that the cancer has spread to most FTSE companies.
Certainly the pharma I used to work for would do much better in developing treatments for human cancers if it treated the human-resource cancer first!
".....I gave myself a 10 for following the smoking guidelines...." Cuts both ways - smokers at one company I know were marked down for timekeeping and attendance because some genius in HR calculated the average smoker lost two hours a week to smoking breaks! Even as a non-smoker I sympathised seeing as I probably spent just as much time getting coffee.
I've just been through this. I got a good rating. Unfortunately, those who got the rating below me (who get criticised and just one step away from actionplans) and the rating above me (who are non-existent as far as anyone knows) are subject to EXACTLY the same pay grade increase! Motivation gone.
It doesn't help much that our department, which works with specific, measurable and achievable pieces of work is judged on (on our scorecard) - "Peer opinions".
This mean that you can do the work at or above standard, but if one person says "they didn't make eye contact with me in the lift at lunchtime one day during the past year." then that's it - that person is on an action plan, regardless of the fact that their current work went without a hiccup! (True story).
And if you're happy in the job, heavens help you. Those who do not seek promotion are marked as cannon fodder for low grades.
Two months of stress which does nothing but lower my performance.
Random - I've just been reading through the formerly-awesome Mini-Microsoft blog. SO many comments from MS employees who hate stack ranking, and the occasional idiot commenting that it's amazing because they happen to have done well out of it.
E.g. check out the article/comments from 2011. Never underestimate the ability of HR to totally ruin a workplace.
There's a subtle shift in emphasis when a company moves from 'Personnel' to 'Human Resources' philosophies.
With the first, they can at least pretend that the department is there to look after the well-being and for the general benefit of the personnel. With the second, it's suddenly explicit that you're no longer a person; your a plug-in, infinitely replaceable and ultimately disposable 'resource'.
Someone who technically does not know what you do should not be writing your review. It will be interesting to see how this turns out - all my completed objectives got reset by my new manager (so now no completed objectives) and the company has added 'attributes' - which is basically a statement on your personality where office politic agendas can be fully played out.
I had a major achievement for the company this year - my reviewer does not know how important or difficult it was.
I imagine I will not accept my rating and just the process has had me looking for a new role... my major achievement has its value after all.
I worked at a company where they saught to allegiate the problems by having reviews every month. Apparently that would make sure that there were no "surprises" come year-end reviews. I was doing a brilliant job getting high end scores for a year until my crazy bi-polar boss took a dislike to me. At the end of the year I was called into the IT Director's office and told that he wanted to fire me because my boss had said how badly I was performing. I showed him all the copies of my great reviews but that was for naught. My boss told him that in reviews that I intimidated my direct manager in the frequent reviews to get good scores.
It was absolutely insane. I don't think I've intimidated anyone in my life.
"I worked at a company where they saught to allegiate the problems by having reviews every month. "
"Allegiate?" I am not familiar with this concept.
"My boss told him that in reviews that I intimidated my direct manager in the frequent reviews to get good scores.
It was absolutely insane. I don't think I've intimidated anyone in my life. "
Me either. Indeed at one point my supervisor at the time said "You don't scare me."
Odd thing to say really.....
Where I work, the general intent of the bell curves is fine, as they are used to even out scores so that one manager isn't scoring more liberally or harshly than another. The seniors keep pumping the results through a spreadsheet until the scores fit the curves. This should be OK as long as the sample size is large, but individual line managers typically only have 10 or fewer direct reports, so if they have to force people into scores just to fit the curve and not their performance relative to their peers, it gets frustrating for both manager and employee.
The dreaded annual review process has been a mainstay of central government for many, many years. In my old Department it used to be "box markings" of 1-5 but someone in their wisdom decided there were too many people with a 3 "average" marking so they made it a 1-6 rating so you could only be above or below average, then insisted that no more than 50% of staff could possibly be above average by definition so of course people who were genuinely OK but nothing special would be down marked & put on monthly improvement reports. Naturally your pay rise would be based on your overall box marking. They eventually changed it back to 1-5 (1 impossibly brilliant, 5 crap).
In recent years they've introduced the ball curve theory of defining how many people overall should get what box marking. Bell curve theory works with large numbers (in the thousands) but they applied it to smaller & smaller numbers until it got down to individual teams so by definition if you were in a team of 10 then at least 1 person HAD to get a box 5 (the lowest), at least 2 more had to get a box marking of 4 (needs significant improvement), a maximum of 1 person could get a box 1 (but was rarely given) etc. This was applied across the board, including a team a relative of mine was in which consisted of only hand picked elite specialists.
WARNING! This is not adviseable unless you are ready to pick a fight, go prepared and already see the result of your imminent appraisal as a management-manufactured fit-up, irrespective of what actually happens during the review. I accept no responsibility, bla bla bla, if you follow this advice and get fired - tough! This will not make you flavour of the month. Now, on with the fun!
If HR insist the review is a two-way process, which they all seem to do nowadays, make sure it is just as painful a process for them as for you. Remember, you cannot be fired for following the correct HR process, so if they emphasise discussion and compromise then you're onto a winner, otherwise it's off to a tribunal.
1. Make sure you set the appointment for the end of the month, preferrably a Friday afternoon. Managers having to tidy up figures for their end of month reports will want to spend as little time as possible on a review. If they have given you tasks they cannot complain if they keep you too busy to meet with them at a time of their convenience, so arrange your work to back up your claim of only being available at a time inconvenient to them. End of year periods are mana from heaven! Keeping their nagging spouses or their bosses waiting will cause them more pain than giving you a few extra points.
2. Pick your battleground - if you have multiple offices and a reason to travel then insist on the one which is going to give the reviewer the biggest traffic nightmare getting back. You won't believe how agreeable they become when faced with two hours of Friday evening rush-hour traffic! Just picking the meeting room with the worst heating/aircon can help. Remember to plan your journey and warn your spouse you may be late, having that already in mind will make it less of a problem to you, whereas the unexpected additional traveltime will be a nasty and distracting thought lurking in the back of their mind during the review.
3. Go prepared to "discuss" and then discuss EVERY minor point! Your process insists it should be a discussion so make sure you can manage a reasonable amount of disagreement over "what you have achieved" and do not be afraid to backtrack and repeat valid arguments if they get obstructive. After all, it's a discussion, you're just following the process, and at the end they need you to sign the bottom to say you agree with the appraisal. Refusal to sign gives them a massive headache with HR. The aim here is to waste their time by doing exactly what the process says you should do, so the longer you drag out the appraisal the more likely they are to want to hurry through later points without arguing. If you play this right in a two-manager review you can even have one manager telling the other to hurry up!
4. Set them up with HR - most formal reviews require more than one manager or an HR bod, so if you remain calm and argue your points in a reasonable manner, and your manager starts getting irritated and insistant (because he's thinking about the traffic and the bollocking waiting at home if he's late) then the HR person is much more likely to think the manager is the problem. Letting other managers know "there could be a personality clash" beforehand will help deflect blame if you do get to a refusal to sign or a seriously angry manager.
5. Be careful as most managers worked their way up and may be wise to your schemes, so even if they don't win that review they will be looking to get their own back! Don't pick a fight you don't need to fight. These tactics will work with the spotty MBA grad, they may backfire with the grizzled oldtimer. And that last bit is not just for any of my team members reading this....
/Once more unto the breach....!
Inconceivable!
A properly designed-by-MBA review process will only look at tasks and objectives that are not part of doing your job. Thus the only way to score 4 is to do less actual work so you can do the BS special project instead. Then, the guy who picks up the slack and does your job, in turn doesn't get much done on his something-to-measure project and gets canned.
A more efficient way to achieve the same hyper-alertness was devised some thousands of years ago.
The centurions would call out every tenth legionary and club him to death. The tribunes would call out the centurions. The praetors would...
One needn't wait for a Legion to lose its eagles. It makes more administrative sense to decimate preemptively.