Since 2011, I have worked at a number of different companies. The smallest was a 3-person company when I joined and the largest has more than 190,000 employees according to Google Search results.
Every company had its own performance evaluation method, some were similar to each other, some we completely different. I wanted to share my observations and experiences regarding those. Disclaimer, I do not claim this is an exhaustive list of performance evaluation methods, nor will I write about Google’s performance cycle as I don’t have experience with that enough.
Most of the time your compensation change is directly related to the performance cycles, promotion is in a direct relation as well. And some companies might provide an additional bonus for good performance. Hence performance evaluations and how to manage them are must-know things for your career in the enterprise world.
I have been part of yearly and half-yearly performance review cycles so far and did not experience any company with quarterly reviews. This will play a role in how one can be more prepared for performance reviews and we will have a look at that in the next paragraphs.
The company I was working for was a software consultancy company focused on data warehousing and reporting solutions. We were building data warehouses, data marts or reports for our clients. We had two types of projects fixed-price, well-scoped and bounded projects; and time and material, unbounded projects.
Our performance reviews were provided by our clients when a bounded project was finished or during update meetings for unbounded projects. Client remarks are considered as the performance input and our management was distilling the results from the income.
How to prepare? To be honest, in this method, there is not much to prepare for the review itself. But one can still work on getting good reviews. My suggestion would work on three things, technical excellence, good documentation and expectations management. A combination of these three should get a good review from the client which in the end will become the performance review input.
I faced this method in bigger companies like scale-ups or enterprises, where one should collect feedback about themselves from at least 1 teammate, at least 1 stakeholder, their own manager and sometimes a peer manager (or stakeholder’s manager).
This method aims to get a 360-degree view of your contributions or weaknesses, and on paper that is perfect. But in practice, it has shortcomings such as the teammate does not want to provide negative (or constructive feedback) and focusing only on positive sides, on the other hand, stakeholders can be ruthlessly critical and forget the good things while perfectly remembering that one incident in the year. The manager can be affected by the promotion quotas and tend to slip some successes between the cracks because they want to promote your teammate and there is no quota for you this year.
How to prepare? My suggestions would be the same as the above method, with some additions. And it depends on the application details of the method. Some companies let you pick your reviewers, in that case, you should pick a balanced audience. Focusing only on the positive reviewers might get you the performance review you want, but it will not provide you with a perspective on the sides you need to grow. Focusing only on the negative reviewers, you may sign up yourself for a performance improvement plan.
This one is very similar to the 360-degree review, with slight improvements. (1) Role expectations are clearly documented, (2) reviewers should review depending on expectations and must provide tangible examples from the events during the performance cycle, (3) the reviewee must also provide a self-review, (4) inputs are reviewed by a committee which then decides on the outcome, (5) manager shares the outcome and prepares a development plan with you.
I, for sure, like this one better than the first two methods. Although it still has some flaws; reviewing yourself, requesting tangible examples, adding a committee and generating a plan make this method superior to the others.
How to prepare? As one of the key elements of this method is self-review. I suggest you keep a “brag document” where you write down everything you achieved in this cycle, how it relates to the role expectations, and how it impacted the job. As I wrote in the beginning performance cycles are done yearly or in every six months. Without such a document you can easily forget your achievements.
This document does not only serve for the self-review, but you can also remind your stakeholders of the projects you worked on together and the outcomes. So they can provide better input.
Performance reviews are part of our employment, that’s why an employee needs to learn how to navigate through the cycles, how to collect honest feedback and how to plan accordingly for their own development.
I started my own “brag document” when I first faced with the better one method as I realised how much I forget every six months. To this day, I keep writing my achievements into the document so I can benefit from it.
What was your experience with the different methods? How do you navigate through performance evaluations? Share them in the comments. Thank you for reading so far and if you like this post you can show it by clicking the applause button, you can read more by becoming a Medium member from this link and part of your membership fee can support me without changing your membership fee. And I leave some similar posts from me below: