211–220 of 342 posts
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> or keep being taken advantage of Presumably they're getting paid for their work.
That doesn't really make any difference. Literal indentured servants got paid for their work.
Full Disclosure: I'm the co-founder of a company focused on feedback / performance reviews. I care deeply about the process of delivering feedback, and would love to hear your thoughts. My email is in my profile. I've read through most of the comments posted thus far, and I'm far from surprised with the varying sentiment. We run into this at Eager Labs, where we facilitate 360s, performance assessments, and more, for…
I sympathize, as I recall going four rounds trying to deliver useful peer feedback to a very patient manager.
I think the block for me was that SBIA is oriented towards an immediate business case, but my thinking was oriented towards improving their performance.
Neither perspective is wrong, though obviously the business case was needed to promote. It highlights a problem with the doctrine behind feedback / performance reviews that views them as discrete units rather than a holistic approach.
I think we really want one continuum of recruiting / professional development / promotion / transition. The day you're interviewed, the company should be asking, "what direction do you want to go in?" and those answers should be the first entry in your file.
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It's in their best interest to acquire those skills, or keep being taken advantage of. A binary choice - that's the world we are living in right now.
Uh, no. I have no desire to start my own business, mainly because I value my off work time.
Having said that, there are situations where performance reviews are a more pragmatic option. As a consultant, I interact daily with my client management, but I can go weeks without any meaningful interaction with my consulting company management. We do check in regularly, and as-needed outside the regular sessions, but my consulting management doesn't take part in my day-to-day work. In order to adequately assess my performance, they need to solicit feedback from client peers and client management. This is a burdensome process that is more practical to perform on a three or six month cycle.
None of this precludes feedback and assessment more frequently, however without the day-to-day observation, some schedule and formality help. I suspect there are many other situations in which people do not work directly with their management.
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I understand either of those, but not the case where an exec picks out some employee they don't know anything about and insists that they be either fired or promoted right just now.
You misread. You're being asked to imagine yourself as the executive - you're the person with firing authority. A manager who works for you asks you to fire someone on their team. There are a hundred people on various teams in your group, you don't have first-hand knowledge of all of their performance. You want to have a system in place for making sure this is a fair request, vs "we argued a few times the last week"…
I once had a contract-to-hire job in which the contract supposedly stipulated that I was guaranteed a full-time permanent position if I passed the six-month performance review, otherwise I would be terminated. They told new hires this to convince them that it wasn't really a temp job. They kept me a temp for ten months, and then laid off all 120 of us.
I would love to believe that management is categorically reasonable, comprehensible, and truthful, but that’s not my experience.
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A problem I'm noting is that information technology seems to have corrosive effects on interpersonal trust. That's not a solid conviction, but it's how I'm leaning.
Subtle adjustment, I think the real cause is scaling human relationships. IT enables this scaling. So if interpersonal trust scales sub-linearly with number of connections, it's not really IT corroding trust, it's what IT enables.
Short version is that in the absence of advanced comms, you have no option but to extend trust. I'm thinking here where inteervals might have been months, eveen years. (Historically, sea passage was not possible from November through May.)
Instead you had trust-establishing institutions, a role usually filled by religion, in virtually every pre-industrial civilisation.
Comms, from the scroll and telegraph forward, obviate this. Wearables, CCTV, desktop tracking, cellphone monitoring, all substitute surveillance for trust.
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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…
It seems wholly unremarkable, to me, that people who work hard, try to anticipate the needs of their employers, keep the big picture in mind, and take initiative are more valuable employees. I wouldn't want to hire indolent and apathetic people, and neither should any business that either is successful or wants to be successful. If you're worried about building products that appeal to the indolent and apathetic, just…
Sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren't. Different roles are going to require different personality types. There are scenarios in which "complacent, trustworthy, consistent" are the 3 most important traits someone needs for a role. Those things may also combine with the other skills you're mentioning, but not always.
Some roles just don't have a career track for advancement, and there's plenty of times where advancing an employee is less beneficial to a company overall so it's best to hire for someone who's just going to settle into their role and be happy with a slight pay increase from time to time.
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you essentially want someone who can read your mind
It's not about reading minds, it's about taking the initiative to make things better or get things done without specifically being told what to do. And there is a big difference between people that can and people that can't. If your significant other reminded you to go to the grocery store, would you get a general idea of what she wanted and go get a bunch of stuff you know y'all need, even if it isn't on the list? O…
And how do I know I won't be yelled at or punished if I happen to get this wrong?
Paraphrasing what a manager told me once: "If anything in your performance review is a surprise, then I have failed as a manager." Coaching is not a purpose of a performance review. The coaching and communication should be an ongoing process that happens before the review. Problems should be brought up early enough that you have a chance to change or improve before it gets to the point of being written in a review. I…
> Yet, I’ve worked on and with many teams filled with growth-mindset people, and universally the response to HR-driven reviews has been a collective groan. People on the team find it awkward, uncomfortable, and a distraction from their work. What? A performance review is never something I've dreaded. They're just a regular, mundane, thing that happens. They tell you 'good job' give you your raise, which is sometimes…
I have had 'performance reviews' where the manager would just make up outrageous claims that were simply not true. So they can be a dreadful experience.