Sorry, but your performance reviews aren’t working for me
“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
I’ve just went through another one of my employer’s performance reviews – and, oh my, am I glad that it’s over now!
A few years ago, the company hired a new CTO, who decried that productivity was too low. The CTO promised to fix it by revamping the performance review process. But instead of improving the existing process, he scrapped what was there and replaced it with the exact same process he knew from his previous job.
Having seen both the old and the new process in action, I believe the new process is an utter failure. Heck, it probably has significantly reduced productivity!
But before I expand on my views here, let me give you a brief overview of the revamped performance review process:
- Twice a year, you have to compose about three pages of text, detailing your individual “impact” (as defined by a narrow job profile).
- You ask coworkers for feedback, who by default will share feedback with your manager only, but not you.
- A handful of metrics are collected about your work and sent to your manager (metrics as absurd as number of pull requests created)
- You manager reviews your submission along those of your 14 colleagues (on average). In many cases, your manager won’t know much else about your work, since they lack the time for having frequent and detailed conversations with everyone.
- Your manager submits a rating for you and then has to make the case for it in front of other managers. They only have a few minutes per employee though.
- Perversely, the distribution of ratings is predetermined - no matter how well everyone did, a certain percentage will have to receive the lowest rating and be fired.
Take a moment and think about the kind of work environment this creates. How would you feel, think and act in such an environment?
Does it make you more likely to take prudent risk, to help a colleague, to care about the customers, or to do work that goes beyond your job profile? Also, would you feel valued, recognized and supported?
My own answer to all these questions is a firm no!
But let me tell you why.
First and foremost, I feel fear. It isn’t an acute kind of fear like in a panic attack though. Instead, it expresses itself as some unspecific anxiety lingering in the background. I suppose you could also call it stress, but only if you had in mind the bad kind (the one that is incredibly unhealthy over long periods of time).
It took me a while to find the cause of that fear, because the most probable one, namely financial security, isn’t something I worry about too much (thanks to a low cost of living, the absence of debt, our savings, and having marketable skills).
A bunch of research and reflection revealed the actual cause: fear of failure. In my mind, receiving a poor performance review is associated with shame. The thought that others might see me failing at something is hard for me to bear. The knowledge that my failure would put a stain on my employment record makes it even more terrifying. I received a poor performance review once before, and it was an experience I’d rather not repeat.
Annoyingly, I’m unable to overcome this fear on my own, no matter how often I try to reframe the situation. I know that the system set up to evaluate performance is a crude joke. It can do a lot of things (including asserting power, making it easier to fire people, and incentivizing productivity theater), but it certainly won’t assess anyone’s actual performance. Consequently, receiving a poor performance review doesn’t mean much and there’s no need to be ashamed of it, let alone to fear it. And yet, I still do.
In fact, I fear a poor performance review so much that avoiding it has become my main motivator at work. And when it comes to creative work, fear is a horrible motivator!
I would love to claim that my fear doesn’t alter my behavior, that I’m still as productive as ever, and that I still care about what’s best for the company and its customers. But none of that is true, of course.
Instead of reaching for the stars, I’m busy covering my bases. More specifically that means:
- suppressing bad news for as long as possible to avoid looking bad, instead of raising potential issues early
- meticulously keeping track of everything I’ve worked on or accomplished, even if it were just minor contributions
- picking projects and tasks that have the highest likelihood of “success”, defined here as making one look good
- taking shortcuts to claim to have made arbitrarily enforced “deadlines”
- focusing on output over outcome, reducing experimentation
- avoiding long term investments, since that kind of work is not being recognized at all
- sticking to personal assignments, rather than helping others to achieve their goals
- self-promoting my work constantly (telling success stories, exaggerating achievements, stepping in just to be visible)
- frantic activity over deliberate action (jumping from project to project without opportunities for learning)
Believe me, I’m definitely not proud of working this way. But I wanted to spell it out clearly at least once, even though you probably think less of me now.
I take comfort in the fact that I’m not the only one working that way though; dozens of colleagues have told me privately that their behavior has changed in a similar way. And how surprising is that, really? After all, it is exactly the kind of behavior that the performance review process incentivizes.
What’s more, some of the brightest people I worked with have left the company due to these changes. This has not only led to a brain drain, but it has also damaged the morale of those who stayed behind.
Sadly, our cumulative actions do add up. The quality of the systems we are working on has suffered greatly. It’s become difficult to make even small changes, let alone to make sense of the entire system. As a result, work has become needlessly difficult, tasks take longer and the number of defects has gone way up.
That’s why I consider the revamped performance review process to be an utter failure. But perhaps the goal wasn’t actually to raise productivity, but to reduce the number of employees. In that case, it might have been fairly effective.