Friday, March 21, 2014

The wisdom of Dilbert (part 2)


“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


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