Our team doesn't do performance reviews. We publicly praise good qualities in people and reward them for doing wonderful things. Having a culture of appreciation inspires people to become the best person they can be at a pace they are comfortable with.
Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
101–110 of 342 posts
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
No offense, but this is the kind of thinking that leads to workplace bias. Working styles like this tend to reinforce hiring single, young men who are otherwise unencumbered so they can work long hours and push the envelope of the job description. That leads to a lot of group think, and products that are built for a very small subset of users — so there is real business value in diversity. Reviews are important for s…
What? you are saying only young single men are willing to work hard and actually function autonomously? That is so offensive I can't fathom you actually believe that.
I agree with you completely and am flabbergasted you're being downvoted on an ostensibly startup-oriented forum. The comment you replied to managed to be ageist and sexist, too.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#103What'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.
> 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. If you've been giving them actionable feedback throughout the year, then it should be as simple as "here is your new salary and your new title" and no one should be surprised about anything.
Yeah, and so it's very easy a lot of times. But you still need some formal paper trail, if for no other purpose than getting that salary into the HR system.
IME reviews are like icebergs: the conversation is the easy part and pretty small. But there's a lot going on behind the scenes throughout the year, and it's useful to have a process to base that off of. For instance, someone has to balance your recommendation for your employee's new salary and title against your peer's recommendation for their employee's new salary and title. And so your performance review information has to be sufficient to make that case to your management.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#104I'll just say this...
In a lot of instances annual review (or any long cycle review) serve a very important bureaucratic purpose for employees: getting raises (and/or promotions). Nearly everything else in a performance review should be handled in some other way, but it's hard to push management into the position to reward an employee financially outside of such a formal setting. This comes with the disclaimer that if your company sees value in performance reviews (and therefore chooses to have them) than it probably also is the type of company where getting a raise outside of a formal setting is hard.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you distinguish those people during interviews? Are there any specific questions you ask?
Not the Op but I hire the same way and there is some questions I like to ask to gauge people's interest in "getting things done". I like to ask about their passions outside of work. Video games? Sports? Communities they may be a part of? I am not looking for passions that align with the company, I am looking for passion itself. Does this person like to dig into the details and figure out how something works and how t…
I'm passionate about caring for my family's needs but I'm not excited to go into detail about it with a stranger for an hour as a psychological test.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#106If we look at performance reviews as a means to justify not giving a raise, I think they do provide, and pay for themselves.
Corporate structure usually has a ceiling for raises in the department, so there needs to be a paper trail on how that gets divided.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#107I think I wish most performance reviews were:
Here's why you are not being promoted this year...
Here's what you need to do to be promoted next year...
Here's why you only got X increase in salary...
Here's what you can do to get a bigger increase next year...
If you are satisfied at your current level, here's what you should keep doing to stay in it...
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#108What'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.
This article is a nice example of quality clickbait. Title: 'Performance Reviews Are A Waste Of Time', ooh contentious. The lede, 'formal performance reviews are a waste of time...', switched 'performance review' for 'formal performance review' while you weren't looking. Now he's set up a new context for his answer - 'a different type of performance review' (where the process starts with a self-assessment)! Lovely.
Bonus points if the author runs a consulting company specializing in alternative performance reviews or a SAAS startup building software to facilitate them. :-)
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
you essentially want someone who can read your mind
The best/worst advice I ever received was "you're doing a great job of what I ask you to, now I need you to do what I don't ask you to" -- at the time, it made no sense. Now, it's a core part of my work style. Developing autonomy is a very valuable skill, and I think that's what OP is driving at. It's also not something that'd been developed during my education. I agree that performance reviews aren't particularly he…
Working autonomously is usually still working for someone, be it a boss or a client. I can deliver results, but I still need to know if I'm delivering value to the client. And since I am mere imperfect human, I know I can improve and so I crave feedback. I'd never want to work with someone so arrogant as to think they don't need constructive criticism from anyone.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
No offense, but this is the kind of thinking that leads to workplace bias. Working styles like this tend to reinforce hiring single, young men who are otherwise unencumbered so they can work long hours and push the envelope of the job description. That leads to a lot of group think, and products that are built for a very small subset of users — so there is real business value in diversity. Reviews are important for s…
What? you are saying only young single men are willing to work hard and actually function autonomously? That is so offensive I can't fathom you actually believe that.
He is saying that people with different background a.) won't be able to guess right what is the thing to learn that will give them advantage later on and would benefit feedback b.) have less free time to play around and thus will perform better if you don't expect tell them to figure via trial and error what is needed.
Through, my experience with this organizational style was bad, mostly because people ended in quite ugly competitive behavior. Mostly due to rules being unclear, resentment being build up, people choosing highly visible tasks instead of needed tasks and so on and so forth.a lot of insecurity everywhere.
There were also a lot of of random attempts by random colleguess to take control and micromanage random people+responsibilities in attempt to look like natural leaders. Did I mentioned insecurity? Someone tring to look like autonomous leader while being completely insecure about limits of his responsibilities and powers is highly unpleasant to work with. You deal with politics like 80% of time as result.