“Employee
engagement was never a real thing.”
Dilbert
The
other day my trusted personal advisor mentioned his unrequited desire that
annual performance reviews could be something positive, or at least
constructive….he mentioned that he had recently been purified in his annual
performance review, with the prospective new goals and objectives “eerily similar”
to last year’s version, and he summoned the grit to mention “only 364 days
until my next annual performance appraisal”….
We
agreed on these obstacles to the imminent transmogrification of performance
appraisals into workplace interactions of beauty and substance:
· almost every manager loathes the obligation to
give negative feedback, and therefore never does so
· it’s an “annual” performance appraisal when it
should be a “weekly” performance reality check, in a less formal and more
personal way
· the purpose of the performance review is
ill-defined, too often it’s the pro forma rationale for a pay increase, and too
often there isn’t any real purpose related to performance improvement and skill
development – if you would ask every manager in the world why he/she does annual
performance reviews, roughly 98.7% of them would
say “because I am required to do so,” and most of the others would be lying
about their motivation
· candid
performance reviews are sometimes used by the organization as the start (or
part) of a paper trail in the event of some impending unpleasantness, such as termination….hence,
the consequent auras of distrust and abuse
Dilbert might have said:
The annual performance review was never a real thing.
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