Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

The worst case scenario of my own business is the whole thing crashing and me having to reorganize my life to accommodate whatever job I can find before my emergency fund runs out.

The worst case scenario for being an employee is getting fired. Pretty much the same outcome but much, much harder to hit.

If I want to start a family or just have a stable enough career to (essentially) never worry about going broke, I'll take the latter. That personality profile just makes keeping a job as simple as hitting the bare minimum requirements (which you habitually blaze past).

Here's what i take away from a company saying i need to do a self evaluation.

1) The company is not going to take my evaluation of myself for any adjustment in position or salary.

2) Therefore it is their attempt to make me be a better employee without any regard to any responsibilities on their side. Sure i'm all for trying to be a better employee, but this is disingenuous.

3) If my boss could accurately evaluate me, i wouldn't need to evaluate myself.

4) The fact that the company requires me to self evaluate, tells me that they suspect that my boss may not be able to do so. Why, i assume it's either because they believe that either my boss doesn't really know what i do, or won't evaluate me fairly for personal or other non business important reasons.

5) If the company is concerned about their management in this regard, and yet continue to have them in those positions without much followup, they don't think very highly of my retention.

Luckily, i have come to realize that even though this is exactly how I feel when asked to be involved in this process, it's likely not the real reason.

One has to remember that HR personnel also want to improve and grow their careers, which entails being able to articulate value propositions to the company as well. How do they do this. Keeping the status quo doesn't get you promoted. Introducing new evaluation processes, including self evaluations, 360 degree evaluations, and other new cutting edge HR policies will.

So likely this onerous new process you are involved in that makes you feel slimy, is just because the HR group needs to justify their positions... which of course should say what you need to know about how you are valued.

I've lived through unfair, biased and unhelpful perf reviews, I know what it's like to have this sky beam open up out of nowhere and vaporize you over absurd nonsense, but in a company of > 100 people you need a paper record of performance.

If you're a VP and suddenly someone asks, "Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?" What are you to go off of? Just a manager's recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased?

Unfair performance reviews are usually a byproduct of bad managers. For ex: I knew fellow managers who never told reports what they were doing wrong, they'd wait til the end-of-the-year review and write vicious stuff. Why? It was hard to say face-to-face.

That's cowardly and not good mgt: you meet weekly or biweekly to discuss all issues, a well-run perf review is a boring rubber stamp on the 25 things you've been discussing all year.

This author suggests that employees present managers "handwritten notes" of their performance "in a notebook every 6-12 months." Guess what-- that's a performance review! As if the problem w/perf reviews was the formality of the process and not the human judgment being applied.

Again, I get it: performance reviews suck. But I think it's not the paperwork or the process, it's that management can be very inept at evaluating talent periodically, regardless of how that process is run.

Unfortunately, it's hard to run a company of > 100 people without written records of performance (especially if someone sues).

Bingo. I'm happy to put in extra effort, go the extra mile, and try to make things better... until about the second time that my efforts go unacknowledged, unimplemented, unrewarded, etc. At which point, what you'll get from me is "exactly what I'm asked to do, and no more, no less" from there out.

Other people are certainly willing and able to work hard and independently, but you do have to provide more formal guidance because you cannot expect someone living in a different cultural context to meet all the standards you hold yourself to. There may simply be a misunderstanding, and because I guarantee the employee would be acutely aware of the understanding gap, it’s on the manager to be aware of it as well.

Informality has a lot of benefits, but it’s also necessarily exclusive to people who don’t know the unwritten, informal rules under which you operate. This can and will lead to a homogeneous team that seems productive from the inside, but may miss other goals because they’re just unaware of them.