Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#21

Post by candiddevmike » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 1:36 PM UTC

In most companies I've worked in: thinly veiled nepotism and cronyism. I've never seen the inputs of a performance management tool being the only inputs for calculating merit or bonus amounts, so the outcomes of both these situations depends heavily on your relationship with your boss and their boss.

Don't get me started on stack ranking or making sure everyone "fits the curve" by knocking down everyone to average because HR said so.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#22

Post by irjustin » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 1:37 PM UTC

BrianOnHN wrote: post #7

What size is your company/team? Different strategies perform well depending on size. For example, most of the time I find OKRs a little excessive for a small team. Have you identified KPIs? What are they? "What's measured is managed," said Drucker. Personally, finding what exactly to measure is difficult. So don't be afraid to spend a lot of time figuring this out. When you do, all the other performance management st…

> I find OKRs a little excessive for a small team

Can you explain this one a bit more? Are there specific pitfalls of the OKR system that don't work well for small teams?

Is it purely a size of the organization as a whole? i.e. If the whole company is <10 OKRs don't work. Or is it inclusive of team size? Any group/unit of <10 should not use OKRs, too single metric heavy.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#23

Post by poof_he_is_gone » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 1:38 PM UTC

I work for a company that makes performance management and recognition and rewards software. As such, it is deeply embedded in our culture. We have a mix of tools that enable goals/OKRs, 1:1s, feedback, structured performance reviews, and 9-box evaluations. I lead product design for the company, and part of the reason I took the job was being able to deep dive into the user experience of how this works, and ultimately improve my own management skills. The process of rebuilding, testing, and developing the tools has exposed me to some top brass HR folks at large companies. It has been awesome being able to get the perspective on what works for individuals, and what outcomes people are expecting at the company level. I really feel like I have grown significantly as a manager in my time here.

At our company Goals/OKRs are set at the individual, department, and company level. You can align your goals up, or set individual (personal growth) goals. These can/should be reviewed in your weekly 1:1s with your manager. We allow anyone to send recognition, or send or request feedback at any point. We have several templates that facilitate different feedback types. We do quarterly Check-Ins which is more of a top down performance review where you can reflect on goal progress, feedback, and next steps with your manager. The 9-box talent assessment is calibrated for each employee twice a year. We also facilitate surveys at the company level to help do things like eNPS scores. If you want to learn more, ask away or check us out at https://www.kazoohr.com/

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#24

Post by cbanek » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 1:40 PM UTC

It's all honestly completely useless. I've never had a useful performance review at any company ever. It's either I'm doing bad, and know it, and that is either my fault or due to reasons outside of my control. Or I'm doing well, and know it. Honestly, sometimes at places things were so bad that I felt I was doing terrible, but I was actually keeping the team going by pushing past a lot of tricky issues.

Really I think any company that waits until performance review time is really broken. That could be a year, or sometimes many years.

Also, the usefulness or performance management is usually undermined by the fact that the people doing the worst usually are in hardcore denial as to their performance. Those people are the hardest to change and manage. I've rarely seen performance management actually fix a problem, other than making the environment so unpalatable that the person just leaves.

I really wish I could have all that time wasted on writing useless "self-reviews" back. Even if I was staring at a blank wall it'd be time better spent.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#25

Post by giantg2 » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 1:42 PM UTC

I work for a large company. There are four ratings you can be assigned - 'not doing your job', 'need more improvement', 'you're doing your job average to well', and 'exceptional' for about 8% of people.

I can't really tell you how it's measured or anything like that. The company has policies about it, but more often than not those policies are blatantly violated. It basically comes down to the subjective opinions of your manager, the department head, and the business people you interact with.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#26

Post by howmayiannoyyou » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 1:42 PM UTC

sandGorgon wrote: post #14

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #6

Slightly off center from your question, but: 1. Every Wednesday I Google Meet with my salespeople. We review the prior week's priority prospects, this week's, and then I ask them about clients not on the list that our BI system has identified as promising. An integration of internal systems, Slack & Zapier alerts me each day to anomalies (good and bad) with clients, inventory and systems. MixMax (shout out to Brad!)…

What kind of anomalies do you track on clients and inventories ?

Client interaction with proposals.

Client interaction with website.

Client follow-through on 'promises' --> sales methodology we employ.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#27

Post by elwell » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 1:42 PM UTC

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #6

Slightly off center from your question, but: 1. Every Wednesday I Google Meet with my salespeople. We review the prior week's priority prospects, this week's, and then I ask them about clients not on the list that our BI system has identified as promising. An integration of internal systems, Slack & Zapier alerts me each day to anomalies (good and bad) with clients, inventory and systems. MixMax (shout out to Brad!)…

> I review Github repository activity for my development teams

Would be interested to hear more details about your thoughts on this. Do you look at # of commits, lines added/subtracted?

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#28

Post by howmayiannoyyou » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

pryelluw wrote: post #11

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #6

Slightly off center from your question, but: 1. Every Wednesday I Google Meet with my salespeople. We review the prior week's priority prospects, this week's, and then I ask them about clients not on the list that our BI system has identified as promising. An integration of internal systems, Slack & Zapier alerts me each day to anomalies (good and bad) with clients, inventory and systems. MixMax (shout out to Brad!)…

I wonder how much you pay your sales people based on the last paragraph.

We're on par with our market and offer benefits our competitors do not.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#29

Post by howmayiannoyyou » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

edpichler wrote: post #9

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #6

Slightly off center from your question, but: 1. Every Wednesday I Google Meet with my salespeople. We review the prior week's priority prospects, this week's, and then I ask them about clients not on the list that our BI system has identified as promising. An integration of internal systems, Slack & Zapier alerts me each day to anomalies (good and bad) with clients, inventory and systems. MixMax (shout out to Brad!)…

How big is your company?

In the seven figures in sales. Assuming we survive the current volatility.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#30

Post by awinder » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 1:44 PM UTC

I’ve used pseudo-OKRs at the last few places, where there’s basically a bailout option where you just change the OKRs at the end of the year to match what happened (if you were doing well). Depends on what you mean by works/doesn’t work. In my experience performance management is mostly about recording business justification for continued employment, bonuses, advancement, or the negative versions of these. So by that metric these systems definitely work.