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

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

#41

Post by BrianOnHN »

irjustin wrote: post #22
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.

For context, my understanding of OKRs is limited to the reading of "Measure what Matters."

In my understanding, OKRs are dependent on organizational clarity of the mission, vision, and metrics.

Now I'm sure there are plenty of teams that have matured in their space and have this organizational clarity.

But when I was referring to small teams, it was in the context of "we're small now, but if we make this work, we'll be bigger."

In the latter, decisions are going to be more bite-sized. And going through the OKR exercise could take as much time as the execution of the tasks.

Edit: in other words, OKRs are great for well-defined outcomes, where the time required is longer than what would be expected from an individual contributor during a week-long sprint.

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

#42

Post by abyssin »

At my previous company, performance management was a show they put on to get a story to tell when it was time to discuss compensation. Lack of performance resulted in firing without warning. Performance assessment gave information about their reading of the job market and the risk you'd jump ship.

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

#44

Post by electricslpnsld »

cbanek wrote: post #24

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 thi…

I wish I had that kind of insight into my ‘performance’ pre-review! I’m at a FAANG right now and given my interactions with my manager alone, I figured I was bombing performance-wise (constant complaints about my work, refuses to acknowledge any accomplishments, super angry at me during one on ones, assigns piles of work that ‘need’ to be done by Monday on Friday at 6pm and then doesn’t even acknowledge the completion of the work next week, ...). Come performance review time on the other hand I’ve had awesome peer reviews, performance ratings, stock refreshes, etc for the past four biannual performance cycles. Given the complete mismatch here between how I feel I’m doing and how my manager treats me, I’m actually pretty happy we have this performance review system in place. Probably just need a new manager...

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

#45

Post by sails »

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!)…

> Xero is hot garbage IMHO, but I've built some integrations

Curious to understand more about these? I've been doing a bit of exploring in the analytics space here, and would love to know where you found the available apps falling short.

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

#46

Post by technics256 »

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 does your BI system identify them as promising? Is this via company metrics already inserted into your CRM or maybe something organically gathered?

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

#47

Post by sushshshsh »

runbsd wrote: post #34
onion2k wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a blessing. As bad as performance management, goal setting, and OKRs can be when it's done badly, working for a company that isn't engaged with helping you to improve is far worse. Even if you're motivated to improve on your own you'll be working with people who aren't and that's more stressful and annoying than any number of performance measurement systems.

Indeed, it breeds apathy. After a while you literally give up on making improvements because nobody else cares to do so, and you just hit massive walls every time you attempt to make change. The best thing you can do is find a different place to work, or start your own business.

Press X to doubt. Everything going fine at my company, no politics and profits are good. Maybe some rogue wave will come some day but that also happens at companies with lots of performance reviews no?

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

#48

Post by JackMorgan »

I'm eight years into management across two different sized companies. Both have ultimately had entirely subjective systems.

I'm currently a director of a twenty person office. My current teams are supposed to have stack ranked individuals, so I simply give everyone the exact average. I also give everyone the same objectives: improve performance with technical debt repayment, use retros to determine working agreements and adhere to them, adhere to a WIP limit and then help any other team areas when there are bottlenecks, do weekly research to keep your skills sharp, self organize your team to best meet the business goals, help anyone with their job when asked or offer a time when you next are free, and if you have no work ask your team for something to do. These are pretty easy to meet, so people usually do well on them.

Ultimately compensation is tied to the whole product, not the employee, since we all split any money evenly.

I find this works exceptionally well at ensuring the ultimate goal is team performance, not individual performance.

Team members not pulling their weight are identified and asked to find a new job or improve. The ones that don't are given low ratings and let go.

In all it allows us to have a very stable team of high performers. Our average tenure is over seven years. No one has any incentive at all to "beat" everyone else. I've found the teams that employ such tactics never have long lasting talent anyway, just a string of "heroes" who burn out after a few years.

Also I flush this out with a regular "salary review" where I try to ensure everyone is paid fair market rate for their job. This happens maybe every 18 months or so for new grads, and less frequently as people get closer to salary ceilings for our location.

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

#49

Post by jerp »

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!)…

Hi this is really interesting. Can you go into any detail on how you achieve 6 please? LinkedIn Scrapers and such?

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

#50

Post by cbanek »

electricslpnsld wrote: post #44
cbanek wrote: post #24

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 thi…

I wish I had that kind of insight into my ‘performance’ pre-review! I’m at a FAANG right now and given my interactions with my manager alone, I figured I was bombing performance-wise (constant complaints about my work, refuses to acknowledge any accomplishments, super angry at me during one on ones, assigns piles of work that ‘need’ to be done by Monday on Friday at 6pm and then doesn’t even acknowledge the completio…

As just a random internet person, please, let me agree that you need a new manager. Other than yourself, no person has more impact on your job, and if you're taking shit and dong well, you can do so much better.

Also, never forget that your performance is 'capped' by your management chain. While others may see that you are amazing, the best they will be able to do is poach you to their team, but they can't override your manager's feelings about raises, promos, etc.

(I feel like I'm talking to past me, who I really wish I could have told this to earlier.)

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