What are you worth, why are you here?
The annual performance assessment process is often not about performance and is hardly an assessment. But we keep doing it.
There might be nothing I hate more than selling myself, working up the energy to tell you how much I’ve done, how it was valuable, how it was essential. Nothing.
The places I’ve worked have asked for this sort of evaluation from me every year, asked me to justify my existence at my desk and continued employment. Worse, the process is often rushed, dashed off as this task, the effort and time involved, is underestimated, and left to the last moment. The resulting document is very strange. The work is summarized, and painfully shoe-horned into whatever someone, somewhere, has identified as the company’s values.
It makes for painful reading.
Perhaps worst of all, the work is shuffled off to the workers themselves. I’m supposed to come up with objectives, determine how far along they are to being complete and identify why they weren’t. The personality schism is sharp – I’m awesome, but not that awesome. I’ve done the work asked, but I guess improvement can be gained?
Who reads these documents, once they’ve been painfully written, indifferently reviewed and dutifully filed? Anyone? How are they interpreted? What is the appeals process?
More often than not, I’m sure employees are often coerced into signing them, endorsing their so-called inadequacies. There is no other alternative, no appeal, nothing. Workers the world over, subjected to this process, are railroaded into an assessment they had to write, that was edited without their agency, and subjected to its formality. Or, at best, the employee is assured of the supposed, grand pointlessness of the whole process, the employee signs, assuming the document will disappear into the archives.
Why do any of this? Are we formalizing performance review, so promotions and raises have something to back them up? If so, why is it so fraught, ham-fisted, rushed and often incompatible with what an employee has done?
Of course people need to be assessed. They need to have something to show them how they’re doing. They need to be given the opportunity to improve. But if one saddles on reward to the process, one saddles on documentation of faults, the incentives become muddled and skewed. Gaming the system begins. There is not utility for the employee and only the most crass, vulgar ones for the employer.
At least, this has been my observation. In the meantime, I’ll continue to fill them out. Write what I can. Cringe through the self-promotion, the self-flagellation, the self-deception. And hope for the best.
Happy annual assessment time, fellow worker bees!