"What is the best career advice you’ve ever received? Odds are it wasn’t from an annual performance review." I guess the odds were in my favor.
Agree - lots of opinion and generalizations here, but painfully short on any kind of supporting evidence.
Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
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Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#12I've been working professionally for over a decade, and it never occurred to me that performance reviews were meant to provide career advice. I thought they were meant to help you understand if your are meeting the expectations for your current capacity. For example, as an engineer at company X, is my development-time vs customer-support-time supposed to be 50/50, 80/20, 20/80, etc.. and how well am I aligning with those specific expectations. I consider this separate from "career advice".
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#13Having a strategy of having the person tell their story, and the manager having their story is a good combination.
like described here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/774088.Difficult_Convers...
It's the conversation together about what the next chapter could be and should be that can be really valuable.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#14I've found performance reviews are good for understanding upwards perception and expectations when a manager doesn't communicate well.
In my experience, I've found that they've lead to an, "oh, I better get out of this place ASAP," or, "oh, there's a problem with my manager that I better raise ASAP with his boss."
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#15I’ve always found my performance reviews to be very useful, and people’s feedback extremely insightful. I think they can be brilliant, and they can be awful. It depends on the approach of the manager and their subordinate.
I'd agree with this, I've had good experiences and downright painful ones with performance reviews. I've always found the process outcomes are heavily influenced by the relationship with my manager. I feel like you need a certain comfort level discussing with them or it tends to fall into that "Waste of Time" the author is referencing.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#16It's more about control.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#17Thanks for calling this out... In my career, I've seen some reviews be a complete waste of time and others provide value. It depends on the company and how seriously your manager takes the process.
During my time at Yahoo the process was an absolute joke as leadership was changing on the daily. When I was a PM at Intuit, I received feedback which I still leverage years after the fact.
People shouldn't feel like performance reviews are the only way to receive feedback. Feedback needs to happen regularly, not on an annual basis. Feedback should also come from people you respect, not the people your boss tells you to listen to at work.
Coincidentally, this is an area I have a lot of passion for given I was a HORRIBLE boss at my last company (acquired by Atlassian): https://medium.com/matter-app/you-matter-d7a0b07d078b
I'm also working to fix this problem, if anyone's interested in chatting on the topic or interested in fixing the problem... brett@matterapp.com
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#18What's the alternative, exactly? You still need some way to tell people whether they are promoted or how big a bonus they get and why it happened that way. Whether you call that communication a "performance review" or not seems like an irrelevant detail.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#19> Avoid the temptation to synthesize and anonymize feedback that really should be given directly.
Yes, yes, YES!
When I solicit feedback for people on my team, I always remind everyone that anonymous feedback is the worst. Honest, direct feedback is incredibly valuable.
Feedback should be the catalyst for a conversation; not a one time statement to be interpreted or ignored.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#20Performance reviews should be always on-going. A good manager will be constantly giving you feedback on the things that would happen in a performance review.
I liked the idea of the self review, and doing that once or twice a year, as a good stepping off point for a discussion on career pathing, but in general, no one should ever be surprised by anything that would come up in that discussion, otherwise you haven't been a good manager.
It's up to the manager to make sure the feedback discussion happens often, and not wait for the employee to ask or wait for a formal review period.