The faceless worldwide entity I work for is abysmal for PR’s. First off, every year we need to fill out the same forms as the managers as a self evaluation, and then we need to sit with the managers as they fill out their copies of the form with what we filled out right beside them. Talk about wasting everyone’s time here. And they don’t even pay attention to what you wrote and fill it in with what they want anyways so whats the point of the self evaluation?

The rating system is 4 out of 5, but you can never ever reach a 5. Excuse is “You can always do better”. I have a flawless attendance record, am never late or leave early, and yet I can do better?! How is that employee motivation when you can never be good enough? And then they want short term and long term goals and tell you what they expect of you with very little to absolutely no follow-up or training. All this for a 1/4 of 1% (or less) pay raise for a grand annual increase of under $100.

After 4 years of this B.S. I just rate myself a 5 in everything and my goals are all “To make money to pay my bills”. Saves me the headache of wasting my time.

And I really do wish that I worked for a company that even remotely thought of giving out bonus’s.

This second consideration is, I believe, the reason we still do performance appraisals: the individual remains paramount despite the declaration by Peter Senge in 1991 The Fifth Discipline that “teams, not individuals will be the basic work unit of the future….because there is too much information relevant to any (significant organizational)endeavor for any one person to be able to hold and manage.”

The point is by continuing to evaluate individuals and not teams or work groups we will perpetuate a paradigm of a business age we no longer live in. Evaluate both instead: balanced appraisal, rewarding in balance accordingly but with primary emphasis on the team’s performance and the individual’s fate tied to it. Complaints about lesser performers? This was Deming’s point: it is everyone’s job to be responsible for the performance of everyone. By doing so, the performance of all was elevated over time. Then again, maybe we just aren’t ready for this paradigm shift.

Consider the alternative, that the Wall Street debacle of recent times was the product of individual(dare I say rogue?), not team performance and suffered from just the reason Senge said the individual as basic work unit is now history. But the real issue of individual v team performance appraisal is deeply rooted in our egoistic, obsessively competitive self-images. That change is far, far more difficult. Without it, performance appraisal will remain in the old paradigm and at best only marginally serve assessment in organizations.

1. Strengths (examples and how they add value)
2. 1 – 3 Areas for Development/Growth- notice it’s not “Weaknesses”. Who wants to hear that?
3. Goals (areas for Development/Growth are translated into objectives in this section
4. NO RATINGS: The focus is on having a collaborative discussion and not on “you’re a 2.75.” Any way you slice it no one wants to be assigned a number and raters hate doing this. It gets in the way of having a good discussion.
5. Compensation is separated from this process – won’t get into the formula in this post, but know that this organization has a way of calculating increases based on overall performance effectiveness.
6. This process occurs 2 times per year
7. Employees were given the skills/tools to allow them to collect feedback in between the formal process.

Personally I’ve seen 15 page evals with everything but the kitchen sink in the document. The most important information may not find its way into the appraisal form or any in between conversations. Most employees agree that the annual performance evaluation process does little to provide the key insights and direction they want.

Check out Rypple.com which seems to be the only new approach to this dilemma in decades! Unlike typical organizational designed processes Rypple let’s the employee gather the information they need to develop. It’s a light weight web based tool that has the look and feel of a social networking site and allows employees to ask what they want, when they want, of who they want and how often they want. Personally I use Rypple all the time to get feedback from people I trust. It’s about time we throw the tired, old fashioned, out of date traditional review process overboard.

About the closest I’ve ever seen in actual practical use to resolve this dilemma is to still give variable individual merit increases based on individual performance but also to pay an identical bonus to every person on a team that meets predefined certain project criteria.

By the way, a team in and of itself does nothing. The concept of a team is a useful abstraction to managers who use it as a work estimation and scheduling tool but at the end of the day it’s individuals that do the work. It’s when those individuals coordinate their efforts towards a common goal that all the good things associated with the term teamwork occur.

That being said, you actually highlight the necessity of this frequently damaging process in your last paragraph where you state, “that performance reviews are a blunt object by which large corporations compensate for poor hiring, terrible line managers, and ultimately bad firing.”

YES! Which is precisely why organizations have them! Do you have any idea how much blood is going to gush from the wound created by the circumstances you list above if we pull off the performance review band-aid?

So let’s say every Enterprise accepts your argument, which frankly few could rationally counter. What next? Set them on the path to correct the deficiencies you cite and watch some real “flailing.”

Which is precisely why I believe that organizations that advocate and foster good leadership and sound governance and their associated processes can create an environment that corrects all of the inadequacies you cite. Which means we have to convince Enterprises that they lack good leadership and sound governance and the associated work processes that enable their people to succeed and thrive.

I say “we” because this is what I try to do every day, and I am delighted by posts such as yours that I am not alone in my quest.

Steve Romero, IT Governance Evangelist
http://community.ca.com/blogs/theitgovernanceevangelist/

The performance review system at most large companies is in place due to a schizophrenic combination of good intentions and laziness. Executives want to be able to say they measure their employees’ performance, but they don’t really want to spend the time necessary to measure it/reward it accurately. So they create a “measurement” system whose biggest virtue is its ability to process a large number of reviews very quickly. Nobody involved does anything good, but everyone gets to say they did.