When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
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Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#2I've always been a big believer that during review time, people should be able to choose others they've worked with to review. It need not be a full on performance review, but at least provide the opportunity to provide documented feedback to their boss.
I've worked with people from other departments who were both awful and wonderful, and if their bosses didn't include me in their set of peer reviewers, I couldn't highlight that. I think my cross-departmental peer review would've been much more valuable than some of my reviews of some of my teammates, since my boss already had a pretty good idea of how we work together.
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#3This should be a monthly census: it needs to be automatic. If you're the manager of a company and you are relying on people to say something about their co-workers, then you will miss most of the information that you could be capturing, and you will get highly biased impression of your workforce, because only a certain type of person will come forward to praise their co-worker.
There are various voting systems that work well, but the easiest is something like "Every month, list 3 of your co-workers who did something impressive."
This avoids the many problems with something like the stack-rank system that Microsoft was committed to, for too many years. In that system, workers were forced to list their co-workers, not just as "good", but also a certain percentage had to belong to the "bad" group, the lowest 30%. Most workers do not want to attack their fellow workers this way.
You can get all the information you need by simply letting your workers upvote each other. You should ration the upvotes so that they are meaningful. On a small team, perhaps people get 1 or 2 votes, in a big company, perhaps they got 5 or 6 votes. If you make the votes a scarce resource, you get better accuracy: people think carefully about who they should upvote.
There will be some workers who never get upvoted by anyone. These are bad workers. There will also be some workers who get very few votes, or who only get votes from "rings" they've formed with other workers, where they vote for each other. These are suspect workers.
In all cases you'll want to apply something like the Google PageRank algorithm to the upvotes. That is, an upvote from someone who is themself highly upvoted should matter more than an upvote from someone who rarely gets upvoted.
I would not ban people from the article's main idea "When your coworker does great work, tell their manager" however, keep in mind, if you are the manager or CTO or CEO, you need to ensure there is also a system in place that is more automatic than simply waiting for people to talk about their co-workers.
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#4This should be a monthly census: it needs to be automatic. If you're the manager of a company and you are relying on people to say something about their co-workers, then you will miss most of the information that you could be capturing, and you will get highly biased impression of your workforce, because only a certain type of person will come forward to praise their co-worker. There are various voting systems that w…
Who are you to know who is doing good work or not? If managers are not involved, they should have no say.
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#5I've always been a big believer that during review time, people should be able to choose others they've worked with to review. It need not be a full on performance review, but at least provide the opportunity to provide documented feedback to their boss. I've worked with people from other departments who were both awful and wonderful, and if their bosses didn't include me in their set of peer reviewers, I couldn't hi…
This is one of the advantages and disadvantages of democratically-run workplaces (worker cooperatives etc). On the one hand, sometimes the people who are best positioned to make decisions about a person aren't their managers but their coworkers. On the other hand, it would really change the work dynamic if everyone potentially had the power to be your manager.
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#6This should be a monthly census: it needs to be automatic. If you're the manager of a company and you are relying on people to say something about their co-workers, then you will miss most of the information that you could be capturing, and you will get highly biased impression of your workforce, because only a certain type of person will come forward to praise their co-worker. There are various voting systems that w…
Who are you to know who is doing good work or not? If managers are not involved, they should have no say.
People do reliably know which of their co-workers are good and which of their co-workers suck badly.
But also, the rule of 150 applies here. At a startup with less than 100 people, each worker often has an idea of everyone's strength, throughout the company. However, if you are at a big company, with thousands of employees in multiple locations, then it is often best to restrict upvoting to some subset of the company. For instance, a company with 1,000 workers might have 10 teams of 100 people each. At such a company, it might make sense to have the rule that you can only upvote people who are on your team. The assumption is that these would be the people you interact with and have a good idea about who is good and who is bad.
Having said all this, I'm not suggesting that this should be the only way that managers evaluate their workers, but having a formal, structured, regular process is important.
There are other techniques that a good manager should also follow. If you have time, you can listen to the interview I gave here:
http://simpleleadership.io/why-group-meetings-can-be-time-wa...
Too many managers waste too much time in big meetings, more time should be spent in one to one meetings.
About this:
"Who are you to know who is doing good work or not?"
I can't tell if you mean that as a criticism of my suggestion or whether you are attacking the original article for the idea "When your coworker does great work, tell their manager." Because, if you believe people can not evaluate their co-workers, then you must disagree with the above article.
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#7I've always been a big believer that during review time, people should be able to choose others they've worked with to review. It need not be a full on performance review, but at least provide the opportunity to provide documented feedback to their boss. I've worked with people from other departments who were both awful and wonderful, and if their bosses didn't include me in their set of peer reviewers, I couldn't hi…
That is how it works at my workplace, you choose who you get feedback from that is presented to your manager. Usually you choose your team and a couple of people you've worked closely with outside the team.
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#8I worked for the airlines (first career) and for public-facing employees it was a big deal if you got a 'good letter' from a customer. (It was equally suck if you happened to get a bad one...).
We also could file 'thank you / attaboy' paperwork for our colleagues, both in our own department or ones we interacted with. Those were just as valuable (if not more) than ones from the customers.
Over the years (11) during my employment there I received a couple of good letters, and they were recognized by the management in a very sincere way.
To this day of & when I have an extraordinary collaboration with someone in the corporation I'll take the time to write a thank you letter to their manager.
It's just a great practice that harkens back to the old adage, "there's nothing better than a nice handwritten thank you card." Since I'm in management, it serves as a nice means to to move the needle for a colleague in the eyes of the company.
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#9From my experience, especially in big companies (but not only) most of the feedback is negative. People are not sharing positive feedback, and when they contact your manager it's usually an escalation process. That's why it's so important to reach to people who support you or simply create a content you like (blog posts, webinars, etc) and say: "thanks, I found a lot of value here".
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who are you to know who is doing good work or not? If managers are not involved, they should have no say.
People do reliably know which of their co-workers are good and which of their co-workers suck badly. But also, the rule of 150 applies here. At a startup with less than 100 people, each worker often has an idea of everyone's strength, throughout the company. However, if you are at a big company, with thousands of employees in multiple locations, then it is often best to restrict upvoting to some subset of the company…
Every time this has been attempted, it devolves into toxic work culture. Also, how can you know what other people are working on? Most of the work is outside anyone's scope, and end up toxic when optimizing for arbitrary metrics.
I speak for myself, mostly unrelated to articles put on www. I don't have to agree or disagree by anyone else's metrics and dominating rhetorics. Not meant to disrespect, but am not fully aboard naive beliefs. Experience and learning from others will in time tell, and moderate good intentions.