Review and Relax

Unexpectedly, I got a letter from my boss's boss yesterday informing me that I'd received a three percent raise, based on my recent performance review. I was surprised, as I'd understood that my review was a courtesy, completed at the six-month milestone to ensure that I was heading in the right direction and not at all tied into the salary-increse process.

That the review resulted in a not-insubstantial raise - and they called it a "raise," not a "performance based salary enhancement" or some such nonsense - was a pleasing springtime bonus. At this rate, the wonders of compounding put me only about a decade from breaking $100k! Please, call me Mr. Moneybags. What's that, Jeeves? For the last time, I told you to put the china set down near the davenport, not the chaise longue. My goodness but it's difficult to avail onself of help commensurate with your station.

At any rate, the surprise letter capped a review process which was pretty much the antithesis of the review process at Old Job. I'd guess that at most I spent about three hours doing my own review, including redrafting my job description and meeting with my boss, and about two hours doing the entire review of my assistant. Both of these reviews were, in my estimation, valuable exercises. While being highly supportive, for instance, my boss made a number of concrete recommendations of new things to do, things to avoid doing, or things to do differently. Concersely, at Old Job, I easily spent ten hours just inputting my handwritten self-evaluation into the absolutely ridiculous online "PerformanceManager" application to which HR was as blindly committed as a jihadi to Paradise. Only this was hell, and it came from a company named "SuccessFactors Employee Performance Management Solutions."

As that near-criminal name might indicate, it was tedious, evaluating myself on the company's paper forms, putting all those round pegs into the square holes provided by PM, sending the eval up to my boss so that s/he could add his/her own material (being careful never to use the uppermost ratings of 4 or 5, because, of course, the average employee is average), and then finally setting down to meet with that boss to go over the eval over the course of a couple 60-minute meetings. All in all, you could count on blowing 40 to 60 hours on these phases of the eval process.

But at least when I'd reached that point, I could see the end of the processs. Prior to that point, I had to go - everyone had to go - through all manner of "best practice" rigamarole, such as the "360 eval," which entailed asking a largish group of coworkers to evaluate you, too. The horror here wasn't that anyone would sabotage me. It was the opposite: I hated to inflict PerformanceManager on them. In fact, I wished I could inflict it on people I hated and didn't want to work with ever again. The boss was supposed to factor these peer evaluations into his/her culminating review, and they did, though usually in an innocuous, "doesn't look like anyone hates you" kind of way. Certainly, neither those peer evals nor the boss's own take on my performance ever led to a meaningful or rigorous plan for "professional development" over the next year. All of my bosses threw out a few ideas - a workshop, a book, maybe joining a new project team, etc. - but they never summed up to anything like a path toward a promotion or, aiming lower, a respectable set of responsibilities.

Largely, I suppose, this was due to the fact that at Old Job I was only once reviewed by someone who was my actual boss at that point. My first review was conducted months after the due date by an Excel jockey who was by then my former boss: I'd already moved into a new position elsewhere in the company. He put me through the wringer, but then just threw on the 3% increase and ushered me out of his office. A few months later, he was fired. At my second review (also months after the due date), my new boss first detailed a number of areas where I was "contributing," assured me that I was a valuable member of her team, and then told me, in essence, that she didn't want to carry my salary line and that I should look for another job in the company toot sweet. After a gut-wrenching six months of flux, I inherited a coworker's job as ill-suited for me as a chador. Less than a year later, that second boss, too, had left the company. My third review, which occurred more or less on time, was conducted by a boss who'd only been my actual supervisor for a few weeks, and hardly knew what I did or should be doing, much less how I was doing it.

All of this isn't so much an indictment of the review process at Old Job as specific instance of the general inclination of business enterprises to overelaborate. In this case, the lead conspirator was Human Resources, whose staff used all all kinds of fake science to make sure nobody got paid more. There were, for instance, the compendia of salary figures which never quite worked out to actually pay anyone more. Even better, there were the laughable Taylorist assumptions inherent in the PerformanceManager system itself, especially the way that your boss's and your peers' subjective evaluations were transferred onto 5-point scales which, when summed up and averaged, suddenly became objective assessments which slotted right into with the company's salary-increase chart.

But all the bosses who respected or at least played along with this arrangment were partly to blame for this ridiculous, wasteful, and near-useless system, too. Nothing would have been better than just sitting down, one on one, with a boss who had reflected on my performance, talked to a few peers and thought up a few ideas for doing a different and better job over the next year. I feel assured in making this claim because I just went through exactly that process, and have come out happier, better guided, and even a little better paid.