The Dreaded Appraisal Season
For some organizations, the year ends in March, and for some others, in December. The managers that work in the December-end organizations have my sympathies, because:
- They have the same amount of regular work as other days,
- They have half the time due to the holidays,
- They have paid time off, and if you don’t take it, it will lapse,
- They have an additional workload — performance appraisals!
Many managers do the right thing: they take leave, work anyway, and spend extra time on appraisals. If they are on a vacation, then they do all this after their family has gone to sleep. Otherwise, their performance won’t be appraised well by the family.
I often wonder about the word performance. The first thing that comes to my mind is that of a stage or a circus. I was curious about how it got associated with work, so I looked it up and I found the following meanings:
- present (a form of entertainment) to an audience.
- carry out, accomplish, or fulfil (an action, task, or function).
- (INFORMAL) have successful or satisfactory sex with someone.
The reason I am pulling out these definitions is to show that the word does have other connotations, it’s not just me. So when filling the form that asks how someone performed, I cannot help thinking of #1 or even #3. These thoughts are perhaps the reason why my performance appraisals never get done in time.
Some people I have known in my career took the first meaning of the word to heart. Come November, they would start to perform like a peacock. They would be all nice and cosy with the boss, volunteering for things that they had no clue how to accomplish and send emails at 1:00 AM. They would have something to say in every meeting, and they became Oh-So-Visible. It was amazing how the season changed their behaviour like it did trees.
Over the years, the format and the questions posed in an appraisal have changed. But a few things have remained the same. One is the inordinate amount of time it takes to write these, whereas if it were a conversation, we would be done in 5 minutes and go for a beer. The other is the cluelessness I have felt when confronted with questions like “Has the employee strived beyond the routine? Give instances.” Some of them remind me of the questions in my History Board exam.
This season, here I am again, staring at a textbox on my laptop, trying to answer similar questions. It doesn’t surprise me to find many responses from others which just have a dot as the response. Since the field is mandatory, I usually write, “No significant observations to make a useful judgement.” But for the less conscientious, the dot works. It is so unnoticeable and does the job of “Nothing to say” very well.
The fact is that most people are just decent at their job. I have not found anyone whose work was so bad that I did not need them any longer. I believe that it’s up to the manager to allocate work that elicits the best work from the team. Neither have I found someone’s work spectacular because if that were indeed true, they would be better than me. Now, that’s impossible, isn’t it?
But then there is the bell-curve. Many organizations have a rule that the ratings cannot all be good. A manager has to identify at least some people who are not up to the mark and get them to do better. Really? If there has to be a “bottom” set of performers, what was I thinking when I hired them? Perhaps I should have hired some incompetent folks on purpose just to fit the bell-curve.
The thing is, even if you are not a manager, you have no escape. There is something called a self-appraisal, which I dread too. I need to think of what all I did in the last twelve months and justify why it was all so awesome. I suspect I have to do it only because my manager doesn’t remember what I did, and so I have to jog their memory. I often sift through my old emails for hours to figure out what is it that I really did, wishing I had kept a journal of all the incredible work I had done. It is usually a waste of time because my manager usually ignores it and has their own say.
Having gone through many such cycles, I wished I could design the process myself. I finally got a chance to do that in a startup that I co-founded. My CEO wanted us all to have a formal process. But due to the lack of an HR department (oh, those days!), I got away by saying there will be none for my team. And when people in my team asked me the basis of their annual salary increments, I just smiled and said, sorry, that’s too subjective. If I tell you, you won’t agree and you will argue. And I won’t change the net result anyway, so let’s just not go there.
And it worked. The team was happy too, because they didn’t have to write their self-appraisals, and yet they got their increments. We got real work done in the meantime.
I got so averse to performance appraisals that some years ago, I vowed to not to take up a manger’s role. I mostly managed to do that in my last two jobs. But in a moment of uncalled-for sincerity, I recently took charge of a small team.
Net result: during the last few days, I spent a lot of time staring at textboxes which deserved just a dot, but I had to write something. I shirked. I wrote this piece instead.