A lot of my material for improving people operations comes from bad examples. Primarily, from more than a decade at a video game studio that was acquired by an international corporation.
Annual performance reviews are one of my best examples of a bad example.
The BigCorp that foisted their processes on us used the typical white collar North American annual performance review. Heaven knows why, other than “This is how all big companies operate so we should do it too.” I can’t fathom what value they derived from it other than to reduce all employees to a 1…5 score to make layoffs easier.
These corporate reviews were several pages long, asked questions that had nothing to do with our roles as game developers, required a self review and a manager review, and were immediately forgotten as soon as they were finished.
If you’ve been unfortunate enough to encounter them, this probably describes your own experience with annual reviews. Onerous to the manager, of no value to the team member, a waste of time, and a bad experience for all involved.
It’s true in games for sure, but also in most tech fields…whatever you were working on 11.5 months ago has little bearing on what you’re doing today. You’ve switched projects since then, you’ve changed managers, the company has added more people to the team and peeled off some of your responsibilities allowing you to specialize. A year is an eternity in almost every modern workplace. Unless you’re working at, say, Johnson & Johnson (“It’s April again folks and you know what that means…time to revisit the shape of the Tylenol capsules! Are the ends round enough?”) everything moves too fast for a 12 month cadence to be meaningful.
I’ve talked before about Ken Blanchard’s model of the Three Tiers of Feedback, and how tier 2 (one-on-one’s) should be doing far more of the lifting than tier 3 (the performance review). Those regular and frequent meetings between team member and manager are where we should be discussing performance issues. When it’s happening, in an informal manner, and with followup to make sure things are getting better (also eliminating one of the cardinal sins of performance feedback…surprising the team member). Almost all of the crimes of the annual review are prevented by effective 1:1s.
What I tell my clients is that they’re much better served with a light weight review process executed every three or six months. Really narrow the focus of what you want to talk about in the review questions. Consider how the process will value the employee. What do they care about? 80% of the time it’s limited to, “Is my job in danger? Do I get a promotion? Do I get a raise?”
Also, remember that the performance review should focus on performance. Development goals are super important, but they should be addressed separately. Create and track your SMART goals or OKRs or whatever in your 1:1s.
If your 1:1s are effective, and they’re covering both performance issues and development, the healthiest place you can get to as a company is when you ask yourselves, “Why do we do performance reviews at all?”
image courtesy of Alex Knight via unsplash
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