Bűlent Duagi

Last week, i had an interesting conversation on the Facebook with a couple of my friends, on performance reviews:

[Billy] History of performance reviews – visualised. Good question: Are reviews going to go social? [see infographic]

[Emil] Nice one! They are already going social, although on internal social media for now. I was surprised it did not include the, I believe famous, time-and-motion studies from the ’50s :)

[Billy] Do you know about cases that support your “They are already going social, although on internal social media for now”? Could you share a link about the studies you’re referring to? Glad to open this conversation :)

[Alex] The problem with reviews is that they don’t always try to underline the positive aspects of one’s work and in the case they were, I believe is a sign of respect of congratulating that employee in person and not with a meaningless ‘Like’ on an obscure page. In the case of a negative evaluation, the “social” evaluation process would simply become a wall of shame.

The true opportunity lies not in the way we can evaluate one’s performance, but how we can make eliminate the noise such that each and every employee can focus more on his work and not on the ceremonies around it (a.k.a. meaningless meetings, emails etc.).

Despite the fact the current evaluation process might not be optimal, it does a good enough job. Companies should focus more on understanding what makes their employees more effective and happy with the things they do, instead of adding another layer of (meaningless) complexity to their work – aka “social” performance evaluation.

[Emil] I cannot back up my words with studies now, but I have a personal understanding and experience of this phenomenon.

First of all, reviews are migrating to becoming less formal, and more feedback-like (at least, according to the article).

Then, we have all the communication and social-media solutions being implemented in companies (eg. http://www.jivesoftware.com/), which besides enhancing communication among geographically dispersed co-workers, also facilitates feedback, and/or reviews.

I do not believe we will reach the point where there is a total transparency inside and outside of the work environment related to one’s performance. We can see it today, partially, when people share their professional successes with their friends, and they receive the well-deserved patting :)

Still, I don’t imagine how it would work to have individual (professional) performance dashboards freely available on the internet, so that anyone can check them.

What is your opinion on this topic?

[Billy] I think that performance review exist now as checkpoints for management’s attention to do the minimum of what should be done for managing performance.Salary adjustments/promotions would be harder to manage if they weren’t calibrated with this kind of semaphore-checkpoints.

The big shift would be the distribution on management’s attention throughout the whole year, continuously managing performance becoming a habit (setting objectives for each cycle of work (week/month/quarter/year + edit objectives if the project reality shifts + evaluating objectives and celebrating accomplishments +ongoing feedback on the behaviour side of achieving results + ongoing awareness of strengths and areas of improvement of the employee)

Now, as we’re speaking about the “social” side of performance management, “social software” could serve as a tool for supporting the acceleration of the big shift, by helping build/develop these ongoing habits of performance management.

Personally, i’m experimenting in my team at Adobe Romania with Rypple (www.rypple.com)

[Andrei] The tool/platform should not be the focus here, these will always change as technology progresses. The real challenge is to educate/equip people to hold robust coaching & feedback conversations. Skills such as empathy, the ability to see things from others’ perspectives, being balanced and adapting your behaviour to the situation at hand (and that includes being assertive when needed, even if it’s not in your nature, for example) and many more. And these are some damn hard “soft-skills” to instill in people. Irrespective of the tool we use, giving feedback will always be challenging (and receiving feedback even more so!- How easy is it for you not to take things personally when faced with constructive feedback? ). Feedback can be a bitter medicine with transformational potential on the long run. We can sweeten the deal with a flashy on-line platform, which has its impact (de-cluttering the whole process and bringing it closer to how people communicate/relate in their normal lives is critical for the success of a performance management approach), but change will not happen unless we focus on coaching&feedback conversations and the associated behaviours.

Curious to hear other perspectives on this topic!