Annual Performance Review Nonsense

[Lisa99]

Just finished my annual performance review. I got GLOWING remarks throughout the review with one comment on room for improvement regarding learning more about the system I support.

At the end of the review was told that my performance was "Achieved Expectations" which on a scale of 1-5 is a 3. Here's the rub...last year I also was rated a 3 and I coasted all year. This year I was rated a 3 and busted my *ss...lesson learned, do what it takes to get by and count down those days to retirement!

BTW, when I asked what I had to do to achieve an "Exceeds Expectations", which is required to get in the bonus pool, I was told "take on more important projects". Well, gee, you assign me my projects right

Rant over.

 

[Brat]

If there is a box to respond to the review I would relate your contributions over the last year and ask for more important projects. Try to be civil when you want to be snide because your review will be read should you want a transfer or promotion. Successful managers advocate for themselves on reviews.

 

[Lisa99]

If there is a box to respond to the review I would relate your contributions over the last year and ask for more important projects. Try to be civil when you want to be snide because your review will be read should you want a transfer or promotion. Successful managers advocate for themselves on reviews.

Very good idea on the response, thanks.

What floored me was the primary project I worked on this year had senior leadership sponsorship and affects about 10,000 of our users worldwide. If that isn't an important project I don't know what is.

After sitting here for an hour and stewing though I think I know what really happened. When the bonus dollars were cut 'friends' were put into the bonus-able categories....it's as simple as that.

 

[Midpack]

That's unfortunate. I don't missing giving or receiving peeformance reviews, a lot of work which rarely achieves the desired outcome - good or bad. I think the latest thinking in the HR world was coming around to scrapping annual/periodic reviews for ongoing feedback with records.

IMO you should not have gotten any NEW negative feedback during the review. I made it a hard and fast rule that a negative had to be formally addressed before any written review. If a negative came up last minute, we could discuss it, but nothing in writing and no impact on any ratings. There should only be positive surprises (if any) and no surprise negatives in a written review, my 2 cents...your manager was out of line it came as a surprise.

 

[W2R]

In some jobs, performance reviews are political and not really related to what you accomplish. Sometimes the supervisor identifies a person ahead of time based on that person's skills in flattery and kissing up, and decides that this person will get "Exceeds Expectations" and get the bonus rather than giving it to someone who actually accomplishes a lot and does the work.

Then, the supervisor has to push everyone else's ratings down since she can't give bonuses to everyone.

Once I had a rotten supervisor who even gave herself all the bonus money each year, giving every last one of us identical "Achieved Expectations" ratings. After about five years of this, people on up the line found out and she had to give someone else a bonus.

What I am saying, is that you shouldn't take this personally. It may, or may not, have anything to do with your actual accomplishments depending on your work environment. Just keep doing your best, and if/when appropriate, blow your own horn a little so that the supervisor knows how much you are doing. You never know when things might turn around.

In other words, my suggestion is that you should not take this as an assessment of your worth as a human being, or even of your worth to the organization. At best, it could reflect a perception of the latter. Don't let it get you down. Take what good from it you can. Be open to more ambitious tasks and keep doing your best. Re-read the evaluation and see if there are any other suggestions and think about those, too.

 

[Free To Canoe]

I hate reviews worse than root canal.
Probably one of the best benefits of ER besides the free time is not having to think about them. It is bad enough the the raise money is given to friends. Now you have to lie about how the others performed.
I feel your pain. It is good to channel that fustration toward a goal such as ER.

 

[travelover]

In my previous j*b, performance ratings were forced into an allocation - 10% maximum top, 10% minimum bottom, etc. There was considerable political wrangling to get a top rating for one of your employees. A lesser qualified employee might get the top rating if his boss was politically skillful and / or just a relentless nutcase. PR rankings were debated for hours.

A good boss has no surprises for subordinates at PR time - managing is a day to day task.


Bottom line, forget about it.

 

[Nuiloa]

I loathe them and refuse to do them.

If someone is doing a good job, they get a reward: it's called a paycheck

If they aren't, they get fired.

As an incentive plan, it works pretty well.

 

[Free To Canoe]

I loathe them and refuse to do them.

If someone is doing a good job, they get a reward: it's called a paycheck

If they aren't, they get fired.

As an incentive plan, it works pretty well.

+1, Loathe. That was the word I was looking for.

 

[Lisa99]

Thanks everyone for the feedback and pep talk.

I've been playing this game for more than 30 years so I should be immune to taking anything personally. Unfortunately when you work for megacorp annual reviews can't be avoided.

My lesson learned this year is to do the best job I can and to expect nothing in return other than a paycheck. I also owe it to my manager to let her know that she set my expectation of a bonus by telling me several times throughout the year that I was one of her top performers (just before she gave me more to do)....hmmmm...think I was being greased up??

 

[FIREd]

In my previous j*b, performance ratings were forced into an allocation - 10% maximum top, 10% minimum bottom, etc. There was considerable political wrangling to get a top rating for one of your employees. A lesser qualified employee might get the top rating if his boss was politically skillful and / or just a relentless nutcase. PR rankings were debated for hours.

My experience also. There were a limited number of spots in the "exceeds expectations" category and merit had little to do with who got in the top 10%. It was pure BS and a huge waste of time.

 

[Rich_by_the_Bay]

Performance reviews are best ignored unless you personally think that something was mentioned that is valid and meaningful to you. Barring a job threatening situation, protesting does little more than make it more conspicuous.

I was tagged as a generous evaluator. I saved my focused or personal comments to our verbal review of the evaluation. The only uncommon exception was someone we needed to document actionable behaviors so we could have an "audit trail" prior to disciplinay actions.

 

[W2R]

Thanks everyone for the feedback and pep talk.

I've been playing this game for more than 30 years so I should be immune to taking anything personally. Unfortunately when you work for megacorp annual reviews can't be avoided.

My lesson learned this year is to do the best job I can and to expect nothing in return other than a paycheck. I also owe it to my manager to let her know that she set my expectation of a bonus by telling me several times throughout the year that I was one of her top performers (just before she gave me more to do)....hmmmm...think I was being greased up??

Ya think? Could be. Another possibility is that maybe she had anticipated more bonus money to be available that there was, and so she had to cut someone out of their bonus. If so, then if she remembers how good you are maybe next year you'll be the first in line.

 

[W2R]

My experience also. There were a limited number of spots in the "exceeds expectations" category and merit had little to do with who got in the top 10%. It was pure BS and a huge waste of time.

+1

 

[JOHNNIE36]

I loathe them and refuse to do them.

If someone is doing a good job, they get a reward: it's called a paycheck

If they aren't, they get fired.

As an incentive plan, it works pretty well.

Wow, you would be tough to work for! Work your butt off and consider yourself lucky to get paid. But, screw off just once and you're out of here.

To be honest, I hated doing annual reviews on my emloyees. I'll tell you how that all got started years ago. If you were a good supervisor you would review the performance of employees from time to time. Trouble is, most supervisors never gave their employees any feedback and then when something went wrong and you had to fire somebody, the employee and upper management wanted to know why they were never told about their shortcomings.

 

[growing_older]

If you trust your supervisor and the review is at all useful, the text will sometimes have meaningful feedback - what you are doing well - what you can improve upon. The actual ranking, categories and bonus pool allocations are often less connected to your individual performance and just there to justify the salary actions and bonus payouts that were probably decided at several levels up in the organization where your individual performance may be completely unknown. In some cases, supervisors are told to fit the evaluations to standards or projected payouts that are set arbitrarily and sometimes based only on recent company financial results, not work performance. A really good supervisor can advocate for you, but many will just be trying to preserve their own political capital and doing what they are instructed.

Take what good you can from it and increase your resolve to FIRE.

 

[scrabbler1]

My worst experience with annual reviews was back in the early 1990s when I was given a bad reveiw for writing reviews poorly for subordinates. Man, was I pissed! I was seeking to get promoted to an official supervisor spot from my assistant supervisor spot (as did several others who got promoted around that time), so I had to write some first drafts of subordinate reviews for my immediate supervisor. He would then mark them up so I put his changes in after some discussion which was fine. Then I gave it to his supervisor (my work unit's manager) and I got slammed for what ended up there, no matter how much I protested.

They used that and some other made-up things to Shang-Hai me into not promoting me to supervisor. I wrote up a careful response and made sure it went not only to the work unit manager's boss but HIS boss (the divisionhead), too (because the manager's boss had to sign off on it). I felt I needed someone to oversee the divisionhead's actions.

That next year was a tough one (I sent out some feelers to look for another job) but I did get my promotion the following year. And the so-called "problems" I had the year before had become magically "solved" and I was doing those things better (even though I had not done anything differently than before).

That work unit manager got switched elsewhere in the division, as did my immediate supervisor (I had become an equal to him anyway), so things improved dramatically in my relations to my superiors later in the 1990s. But that whole episode left a bad taste in my mouth for several years.

 

[FreeAtLast]

I was a computer consultant or contract programmer most of my career, however, there was one year that I took a FT position with a company that I had done contract programming for.

Annual review time came and I could not believe all of the fuss that went on. We even had to attend an hour training class on how to go through an annual review.

We had forms in triplicate to fill out and I do remember getting a raise. The company was in the process of being sold and our jobs were relocated to another state so we were all gone by the time of the next review.

 

[scrabbler1]

Annual review time came and I could not believe all of the fuss that went on. We even had to attend an hour training class on how to go through an annual review.

I remember when my old company revamped (again) its employee evaluation program in the mid-1990s and held a several-hours training program which began 30 minutes before my usual arrival time, forcing me to take an earlier and more crowded train (remember how much I detested my commute!) to attend the awful, useless thing.

 

[toreornot]

I too have just finished mine and my team's. The concept is important but the execution seems to be quite flawed in many companies out there. My prior employer also had adopted Jack Welch's forced bell curve pampering the top 10% and putting the botton 10% on notice. ER seems an attracive way out of all this.

 

[cocobird]

rotating bonuses

At one time, my workplace allocated bonuses to the top third. Since some of the managers were complete wimps, they rotated the top third each year so that everyone eventually got a bonus, whether deserved or not.

What made it worse was that the employees were asked to provide input in the form of a self appraisal. It didn't matter what you had done, because you got a bonus if it was your turn and you didn't get one if it wasn't. So self appraisals were a huge waste of time.

 

[rescueme]

Since retirement, my DW gives me an annual performance review ...

It always is the same - "Much room for improvement" ....

BTW, as one that gave them (as well as received them) during my "accumulation years", it is also difficult to give them - especially if you have a group of good performers who all deserve a raise, but upper management declares you can't just give an across the board increase, but must rate 1,2,3 etc. in performance.

I don't miss getting or receiving this annual "gift exchange". Add another one to the list...

 

[scrabbler1]

I too have just finished mine and my team's. The concept is important but the execution seems to be quite flawed in many companies out there. My prior employer also had adopted Jack Welch's forced bell curve pampering the top 10% and putting the botton 10% on notice. ER seems an attracive way out of all this.

My old company put into place one of those A-B-C rankings and had quotas for all 3 groups, particularly the C group, in which those dreaded Cs would get little or no raises and/or bonuses (with the implied desired result to get those Cs to quit the company at some point soon).

I asked a question in a large staff meeting about this system: "If those Cs leave, then some of those in the lower end of the B rating band will have to be given Cs even though their work performance has not actually worsened - only the departure of the Cs downgraded them. Does that seem right?" The bigwig replied that the Cs leaving "forced" those in the lower part of the B rating band to work better to avoid getting the dreaded C.

Somehow, I did not find that a satisfying answer, that someone else's departure can hurt your own job evaluation even if you don't work on the same projects. But that's the corporate culture, and I am glad I am not part of it any more. [Lake Wobegon, perhaps?]

BTW I worked part-time in the years this A-B-C system was put in place, so I was thankfully exempt from being rated this way.

 

[ziggy29]

At the end of the review was told that my performance was "Achieved Expectations" which on a scale of 1-5 is a 3. Here's the rub...last year I also was rated a 3 and I coasted all year. This year I was rated a 3 and busted my *ss...lesson learned, do what it takes to get by and count down those days to retirement!

Yeah -- the lesson these days is -- as long as unemployment is high and people fear for their jobs, there's no limit to our ability to increase expectations, even as we freeze your pay and slash your benefits for a steadily increasing number of hours worked.

I feel your pain. Literally -- I've been getting some w*rk-related aches and pains lately that flare up when they stress me out.

This may or may not be my last j*b, but if it's not, I will never, ever work for a publicly traded company again. The combination of a lousy economy and shareholder expectations are making life hell for a lot of workers.

 

[citrine]

I hated those annual performance evaluations! No matter how hard I worked or didn't....they would give a 2% across the board except to the ones who kissed enough ass!
Thank God I don't have that bs to deal with anymore!