Ask HN: How does performance appraisals happen in your organisation? What's the process like? Is it one time effort at the end of the year or there are some continuous efforts made throughout the year. Also, please mention if some tools are used for the same. And lastly, are your satisfied with the process? |
How satisfied am I with it? I hate it and it's the sure shot way to ruin mental health of your employees.
Tools used: Workday (which deserves a special place in hell itself)
For promotions, you give a 1-2hr presentation on the work you've done to a group of other developers and managers not directly working with you. Work done needs to match 51% of the competencies to go to the next level. Usually the pay increase is 10% per level (promotion).
It's practically impossible to get fired. Only way is up.
AFAIK every department follows this structure for performance[1], so that's about 200k employees.
The promotion system is a bit special for my department, since it's tailored for software engineers (about 40% of the department). The rest of the public service has a more competitive system, more similar to the private sector.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/treasury-board-secretariat/services...
Seems to be the most common methodology.
Simultaneously I am encouraged to request feedback from my colleagues and they from me, in the same system. Also via the system, my skip-level sends me a request for feedback about my manager, and I have the option to make it anonymous to her (the skip), regardless it will not be visible to my manager.
Less formally, my manager periodically emails me asking for feedback about my colleagues, a few weeks later he shares with me what others said about me (anonymously).
I don't know how this process plays in to the raise and promotion discussion, it's opaque to me. Filling these things out is not my favorite task, it creates stress for me. I'm not sure if it's overall a good thing or not compared to my previous job where we had none of this, as well as no job titles, levels, promotions, etc. We just worked and got raises now and then, sometimes you had to ask and sometimes you didn't.
Does this apply to people working in Engineering? are you incentivized to have goals that have impact on D&I?
Microsoft
I know I'm not perfect and have even asked the person I report to for feedback / training / continuing education opportunities and he literally says he doesn't have any for me. I've asked HR too but they have no suggestions.
There is some incompetence, negligence and careless mistakes that occur repeatedly with specific team members but there isn't any kind of corrective measures being made with anyone. I believe performance reviews would help rectify this problem.
When working for previous companies, we had extensive performance reviews, 1 on 1s and step 1 on 1s with our supervisor's supervisor. Everyone always took those opportunities seriously and wrote essay-like evaluations. It was time consuming but now I actually miss those days.
In my past organization, I never got any non-peer feedback whatsoever, even though they were expected every three months.
In my current organization, you get a little bit in biweekly 1 on 1s, but otherwise I have little idea how the org rates me overall.
I like it. No 360 bullshit, no subjective manager bullshit. Everyone is held to the same standard.
I ignore it and just do my job to the best of my ability. It works pretty well except for managers who try push silly things like increasing exposure or demonstrating leadership.
They are okay losing people, okay losing the investment done in them, okay losing the knowledge of systems they acquired for a rule someone in the HR made because they read a study on it. What a bunch of buffoons really.