On Year Reviews
Every now and then, in every other company, there’s this time where people get evaluated for their performance during a certain period. I believe many of us are familiar with this sort of corporate routine: you get evaluated by others, you may get to evaluate others too, and sometimes you’ll even get to evaluate yourself.
While this may be for some a time of pressure, I actually find it quite motivating. On one hand, the evaluation “season” makes for a great reason to retrospect on the past year: things that were accomplished, things that could’ve gone better, what you learned, what you taught… I always get that “Oh, that’s right! It WAS this year that I worked in the <insert project of choice here>” feeling, and it helps you sometimes see how much – or how little – you’ve changed, as a professional and as a person.
Still, there’s a task which I always feel a bit unconfortable doing, which is the peer evaluation. I believe that if you’re going to point out things for someone to improve you might just do it in a constructive way. This way, the one being evaluated feels not so much as being pointed out for doing something not as well as it should, but more as being told that he has the potential of doing something better, and that we are counting on him because we know that he is not doing things that way on purpose and that we know that he can do better. It’s a shift from “you’re not doing things as we expected” towards something more like “you’re not doing things the way that we are confident that you know how… And if you don’t know – or if it turns out that you can’t make it as well as we expect yet – you can count on us to help you in whatever we can”.
Though I feel this works great, there’s a problem: for each thing to improve, I write circa two sentences – one for pointing out what could be improved, and then one or two about things that could help improve. Imagine that I have 3 points for a person to improve – that’s a whole 6 sentence paragraph! Now, since I do NOT detail the person’s merits – so it won’t risk coming out as flattery, which is not useful at all - just pointing them out (“good technical skills”, “great team player”, “best taste in screen-savers”, etc.) ends up with evaluations that, text-length-wise, are 20% merits, 80% points to be improved, even though it might be the case where the quantity of merits surpasses the quantity of things to be improved.
No matter how you try to shake it, if you get an evaluation like this, after reading the whole text all you’ll be able to see is 2 lines for praise, and 8 lines for criticism. Your mind will keep seeing “so little praise, so much criticism”.
Well, I haven’t settled for a solution yet, but if things go wrong with this type of text, next year I think I might try something different: constructive praise and blatant-flat-out-destructive criticism (without elaborating).
No one will ever complaint about this year’s apparent 20% praise/80% criticism ratio again after that.
February 13, 2007 at 10:50 am
I understand your feelings about criticizing too much as apposed to complementing, but I really don’t think you should worry too much about it. Here’s why:
If I’m doing something right, of course I like to know it. All I need is a “Well done” sentence, it is enough.
If I’m doing something bad, I need more than a “Bad boy” sentence. I need something like “You’re doing this wrong because … and you should to it like this … or try that …”. So I actually expect my evaluations to contain much more criticizing content than compliments.
So fire away your critics, be merciless and end the evaluation with a pat on the back: “Nice screen-saver though!” :)