I started a new job back in January and had my first performance review recently. I talked to my manager yesterday about how the process works and how they come up with a numeric assessment.
The scores at this company range from 1 to 5. If you get below a 3, you’re doing unacceptably poorly and will be put into the improvement-or-firing track. If you get above a 3.5, you’re on track for a promotion. Nobody gets above a 4. According to my manager, 99% of people get between 3 and 4.
I was tempted to send him a link to Tom’s discussion on game scoring but I think this company is a bit too large for me to make a difference on this front.
That is precisely the system at my previous job. A 1 or 2 is “you better get your ass on track or you’re gone”, a 3 is “doing your job”, and a 4-5 is exceeding expectations. Managers were basically unable to give a 4 or a 5, though. If they were to do so they had to file enormous amounts of paperwork and spend months fighting up the reporting chain to make the case, where they were inevitably shot down anyway. As you can imagine, few rarely tried it after going through the hassle only to have it overruled in the end. You were only really eligible for a raise if you achieved a 4 or above, BTW. Needless to say, morale was low but this was during the 2008 financial crisis so a lot of us were stuck.
It’s not that unreasonable - the point of a performance review should be to assess whether or not someone is doing the job they are supposed to do, and how to help them do it better, or reward them for over-achieving. A promotion should really be a combination of recognition of increased value and thus increased expectation - you get a bigger title, a bigger salary, you need to perform better. If you aren’t already out-performing the job you are in, you probably shouldn’t be given a job where more is expected. Of course, plenty of these systems become automated into nonsense because people seem to think that assigning a number makes things more objectively real. The one place where assigning a number does accomplish something, though, is if you keep it really simple: here are 10-20 factors that we think make a good employee, slap a 2-4 on the employee’s performance in those areas, and then we will be able to assign weights to the different factors and come up with an overall number. If everyone is clear on what the numbers mean, this should produce a spectrum of achievement within a role (at a big enough company), and thus allow us to assess a) what we should be expecting from that role, and b) who should be moved up from it.
With games, it’s a different story. With games we are really trying to assess what percentage of your gaming time should be spent on it (if you play only one game this fall should this be it?), whether or not it provides decent value for its cost (in money, but also in time, relative to other options currently available), and to some extent where it fits in the spectrum of game history - does it move things forward in a significant way? does it do anything that hasn’t been done even if that’s not necessarily a step forward? does it have some artistic merit that isn’t captured by those two questions? and so on. Slapping a number on a game is as dumb as putting one on a human if you stop at just the number, but I would argue that doing game rating by answering a battery of more detailed questions about it with a number 1-5 (that leans heavily towards the center) would actually be a good thing. Instead of the silly categories like “audio” “graphics” and “gameplay” having real ones that actually cater to potential player profiles, like “strategic decision-making” “twitch skill response” “immersive world” and so on would be the right paradigm. Then you create “genre profiles” where certain of those categories are expected to get high (or low) ratings relative to other genres (effectively shifting the middle) and you have a meaningful rating. So the question isn’t just “how immersive is this game world?” the question is “how immersive is this game world relative to other multiplayer-fps games?”
I think the 99% line maybe exaggerated by your boss. Most large companies who still do reviews have a forced ranking system where X% MUST be rated in the bottom rank and X% MUST be rated in the top rank. That % can vary but 10% each is not uncommon with 80% in the middling numbers.
Anyway reviews like that are awful and a waste of everyone’s time. I am very proud that we made them optional (IE: if the employee wants a review they get one, otherwise they do not have to bother with it.)
Its amazing how much extra work you can do if you dont have the company pissing away a week every year on pointless review paperwork.
In my experience in a large firm, your most immediate manager will probably decide that the easiest course of action is to tell everyone who gets an adequate rating that their hands are essentially tied. It allows them to offload your unhappiness to a faceless part of the corporation instead of you being unhappy with them. That said, if you are sure you deserve a higher rating, you will probably need to push for it. Build a case for why you are exceeding expectations, keep track of situations where you went the extra mile. If there are metrics around your job, point out the ones you look good in.
Getting raises/promotions at a big company is a job skill in itself. I always found that the easiest route was to get another group in the company to offer me a new job and then get my existing group to match it.
My daughter’s school just adopted your performance rating system for grades. According to the teachers, it’s impossible to get a 5, 4 means you’re doing great, 3 is acceptable, 2 is unacceptable, and it’s impossible to get a 1.
When I asked my daughter’s teacher why they didn’t use a 1-3 scale, she said that would have just made too much sense.
I think what people fail to see is these systems aren’t trying to rate an object against a subset of all objects (eg, in your case rating an employee against other employees in the company), they’re rating an object against all other objects of that class. So, random dude off the street would probably get a performance review of 1.0 in “Weapons Grade Plutonium Manufacturing”, whereas one would hope a qualified individual would hit the 3-4 range. If a qualified individual hit a 1 (eg, he is roughly equal to random guy off the street) that’s a red flag.
In games, I believe if every game was rated we would see a significant increase in your 1-5 range. The fact is a large number of games aren’t even checked by the mainstream press. They’re not trying to create a scale that only cares about AAA titles, what they’re saying when they give a AAA a 5 is basically “This game, which you probably expect to have the quality of a Call of Duty, actually has the quality of a small studio’s beta”. For example, Aliens: Colonial Marines, which hit around the 5 mark for mainstream press.
Most of the “7-9” scale arguments I see seem to revolve around the idea that the press is only rating games relative to other games they have already published scores for. I think they’re rating the games relative to gaming as a hobby.
Basically it was based solely upon kissing ass and making the appearance of working: I.e. if you came into work at 7 before the boss and left at 17, spending the whole day reading newspapers or asking others for help, you would get a 4.
If you came in sometimes between 9-10 every day and worked until 17 and solved 40% of the total incidents per year (Service Desk system) (out of 7 people) - including answering all the questions the 4s couldn’t solve - you’d get a 2 or 3.
Awesome system :)
No surprise that nobody in that department are working at the company anymore, including the kiss-asses, as they would be useless on their own :)
Well, technically the way it works is approximately as follows (as I understand it):
You start at 3. If you have a good quarter, you get +0.1. if you have an excellent quarter, you get +0.2. Once you pass 3.5 for a couple quarters in a row, you are a good candidate for promotion. If you get promoted (which requires both the rating and doing important work and applying to be promoted or having your manager apply on your behalf), you get reset to 3 in your new job level. So for anyone to actually have a rating over 4, they’d have to be doing really good work but for whatever reason not be promoted for multiple years.
I assume that if you’re doing a bad job, you drop under 3 faster than 0.1 at a time, but I don’t know that for sure.
Also, this is generally considered to be an excellent employer, and I’m very happy there. I don’t think these bands are to manipulate the numbers or avoid paying people what they should get, I think they’re just a really unfortunate side effect of the system as it exists.
As someone who designed this system for a popular professional/social network company, we have the review done quarterly. We have clear performance profiles for each job and we just score them against their profile. As they get closer to and above 4 it is time to promote them to the next level. It is a pretty simple, clean, and effective system. I prefer managers to talk with their employees each month about their career aspirations and to give feedback real time. There should be no surprises. Career conversations are always a lot more important to employees than managers think which is why we want them happening more than the manager thinks they should be happening.
I have since left HR though and am now in Sales. I’ll let you know how going through the system feels in practice when I get some experience with it.
Performance reviews really are the worst, especially the 360° style. Today, I was “honored” to receive several pages of anonymous snark, almost all of it entirely misdirected because it was criticizing me for things totally out of my control, with maybe 1 short mildly useful comment. Now, my annual salary adjustment and bonus depend on that snark, to a large degree.
On top of that, with a disengaged manager who handed me off to another disengaged manager in the middle of the year, my official comments and review fodder were mostly both irrelevant to the work I did or the manner in which I did it. Or, it was flat out wrong or should have been somebody else’s feedback.
I guess in that type of system, the only way to get good reviews is to constantly toot your horn loudly enough so that others always hear it? Sorry – that ain’t me.
What a waste of time. It put me in a terrible mood, to boot.
Oops. I just realized this was in #games. Well, it felt like a game. :p
Sorry to hear it, @Clay. The review process at work is sort of perfunctory and dull in my department, as raises are state-mandated and basically utterly untied to our reviews/managers’ opinions, so it’s mostly an excuse to sit uncomfortably with a higher power for an hour and talk about yourself. . .
. . . The mandatory peer review BS seemed crazypants to me ever since I heard of it over at MS. Blagh, sorry again, man :(
