Earned Lessons

Twitter Summary: Some of your most important performance reviews don’t happen at work.

Performance reviews come from everyone in your life, its just that work is the only place where they have formalized it and based your compensation on its result.  I frequently joke that every year my family should give me a “How am I doing?” customer service card.

Many years ago I was approached by a colleague who was concerned that his performance review at work for the year would not be up to his previous year’s reviews.  He was intending to take the maximum amount of time he could take for paternity leave, but also wanted to keep his standing as one of the top engineers in the company.  His concern was how would he be able to maintain his high ranking while still keeping his commitments at home.  I was about to offer a suggestion to help, but realized that the best advice was to make sure when he went on paternity leave, he actually took the time off.

Your work performance review is important enough to rate the time and energy to create a formal process to collect information, assess performance relative to others, and make recommendations for future improvement.  Unfortunately, a 360 review encompasses only your performance at work, it doesn’t cover your performance as a father, friend or spouse.   I imagine our perspective about the importance of our yearly work reviews would be much different if the 360 review included a) your kids review your abilities as a parent, b) your friends rating of how much their lives are made better with you in their life and c) your significant other reivews your contribution to their life.

Twitter Summary:  Short-term focused performance reviews can help you deliver on tangible results.

I have a personal loathing for the yearly multi-page performance review where: A) All an employee’s past year’s work is reviewed, B) All their work for the upcoming year is planned and mapped to company, organization, and team objectives,  C) All their personal development tasks for the year are listed, and D) 360 review feedback is summarized, E) Everything is distilled to a single letter/number/score, and F) Becomes the basis of the employee’s compensation, bonuses and future path within the company.  The process is difficult and drawn out for the managers who have to assemble the information for their team. It can take weeks to assemble the information and craft a review and schedule a meeting for each  employee. The process is also difficult and drawn out for the employee who has to wait until everything is assembled to find out how the company thought they performed this year. This is further complicated by the opacity in what is going on with the reviews as it is taking so much time to do. The management gurus at Harvard Business School highlight that performance reviews are imperfect and are looking for better ways to improve the process suggesting that the best way is “continuous performance reviews”.

In startups and agile organizations this approach is especially problematic as the goals for the team and company can change over the span of a few weeks. Rewriting documents for each employee so that they can have the benefit of an accurate assessment for the employee’s performance review adds even more time to organizations that are striving to be nimble.

The best process I have seen to date has been to a) de-couple all the reviews bundled into the yearly review and spread them out through the year and b) set the employees expectations as to the goals of each review element and how it impacts their career growth.  The types of performance reviews that should be split throughout the year are:

• Company and team performance reviews can happen quarterly or bi-anually so that management can set expectations if the company is doing great, or if it is struggling to keep payroll and what everyone can expect in terms of compensation and future tasks.
• Employee performance reviews that happen quarterly can cover what happened last quarter and what needs to happen in the next quarter for the employee and the company to be successful
• Personal development reviews can happen 2 to 4 times per year covering what the employee would like to learn to do their job better and what the team would like to help deliver for the customer.
• Compensation reviews can happen 1 to 2 times per year, on a separate cycle where all the previous performance and personal reviews for the past year are assembled and the employee’s contributions and the impact of the team’ and company’s work can help reflect what types of compensation adjustment are necessary.

By splitting out all the reviews into smaller more frequent reviews you gain the benefits of:

• Less work for managers and employees who can focus on deliverables for the next quarter.
• Smaller focused reviews are easier for managers and employees to write-up and explain.
• Manager and employees have more frequent checkins as to employee’s performance in the context of the team and the company.
• Personal development tasks are given priority as it is not hindered by people thinking about their performance or compensation bundled in the same document.
• Decoupling the compensaton conversation from multiple performance evaluations helps the manager set the employee’s expectaions as to how much of an adjustment can be made.

The role of performance reviews is important in helping make sure that the team is focused on the correct things for the company to deliver on its goals.  By setting the employees, managers and company’s expectations for each performance review element covers, you increase the transparency in how the company will succeed.  This advice does take some extra scheduling steps for managers, but spreading the tasks throughout the year ensures that there is constant communication of managers with employees.  In addition anything that takes a company away from a 20 page per employee review is likely to be less onerous, and help move towards a clearer and better run performance process and happier employees.

Twitter Summary: Recognizing individual contributions with artifacts of success are a part of any team culture. Make sure to do it right.

Physical artifacts of success have been around as long as people have been cooperating in accomplishing goals.  Hunters collect trophies of their first kills. Microsoft programmers get “ShipIt” awards. These physical mementos are typically very group sensitive and can be very elaborate especially when you compare the United States Military awards and decorations to the simpler but more permanent Maori tattoos. Despite the differences, their purpose is so that groups can identify their own and have an idea of how each has contributed to the benefit of their group.

Most companies I have worked for has had an analogue to this from t-shirts and laminated sheets of paper for product launches to Lucite plaques for creating patents.   In the best of cases, there are pretty clear requirements for awards. To get a patent block, you must have a patent application.  In the worst case, it can feel like the mementos are just being handed out to anyone who is standing nearby or to curry favor.  This can cause resentment among the team members and create disincentives among the very people who you want to show your appreciation.

With the potential issues surrounding physical artifacts of success, it is tempting just not to create any at all.  However, every group develops its own symbols to self-identify. If you can come up with a clear simple rule set for how these artifacts are given out, you can maintain the integrity of the mementos and give people recognition for how their efforts have helped the team.

Qualities for creating a meaningful physical “Artifact of Success”:

1. Goal based — Give “artifacts of success” only for contributions that help with company’s goals. Product, project launches that create substantive value and took focused organization effort for the company should be recognized. Don’t recognize things that are nice, but not distinguishing for the company.
2. Limited — The mementos will only be created for the few that achieved the goal or contributed for the benefit of the team. If necessary, create a simple rule to identify who gets things and who doesn’t. Don’t devalue the identification by handing them out arbitrarily.
3. Inexpensive — By using inexpensive tokens (paper, baseballs, golf balls, origami birds, colored pins), there is no mistaking that the purpose of this is recognition not compensation.
4. Portable — As much as I love a good t-shirt, I can’t carry all of them with me, so having a jar of launch golf balls, or tokens that I can post on a wall or hold on a desk will suffice.
5. Sincere — I am always a fan of the memento listing: The name of the event, the date of the event, and being cross-signed by all the team-members at the launch party, or by the CEO/organizational lead for the company.
6. Composable, stackable, groupable — If the physical artifacts of success can be composed, similar to military badges, Maori tatoos or Amazon’s patent blocks, you create a compelling visual effect that enhances the value when you have sets of successes.

By spending a little time on what qualifies as something that deserves “recognition” and what would be team appropriate, you should be able to create your own visual shorthand to recognize team members contributions to the company.