An immediate review system, which in this case sounds like just a forum for immediate complaints/reprimands, sounds terrible because given a negative situation the feedback hasn't had any cool-down time. It sounds very toxic, tactless, lacking introspection, and easily decorated with anger.
We need to be focusing on the context around failures and what the factors were in a situation where a person's actions contributed to a failure. Why did what they were doing make sense to them at the time?
This isn't captured in a 360 review cycle, nor this particular one. I just don't think it fits the tech paradigm of blamelessness/blame-aware at all.
I am struggling to find any reasonable point in this process. Performance reviews in general are more formality than anything in my opinion. At the end of the day I can gauge how my impact is respected across a company on a mgmt/executive level by the money that lands in my bank account. The review cycle from mgmt really does not address any other intricacies.
> An immediate review system, which in this case sounds like just a forum for immediate complaints/reprimands, sounds terrible because given a negative situation the feedback hasn't had any cool-down time. It sounds very toxic, tactless, lacking introspection, and easily decorated with anger.
You've described basically any feedback mechanism at all. Cooldown time or not, a 360 feedback system only works in a culture that enables it. The feedback will be toxic if the culture is toxic. The timeliness of the feedback isn't likely to change that.
> Performance reviews in general are more formality than anything in my opinion.
Ah, and now we come right to it. You don't actually believe in a system of employee evaluation.
That's your opinion. You're free to have it, but it implies that feedback is not a path to skill or career development, and I deeply and fundamentally disagree with that premise.
> At the end of the day I can gauge how my impact is respected across a company on a mgmt/executive level by the money that lands in my bank account.
If you think that's all that reviews are about--gauging impact, ascribing blame, or simply analyzing failures--you're already missing the point.
Feedback is about many things:
* Identifying and lauding successes.
* Feedback to address performance concerns.
* Feedback for skill improvement.
* Feedback for career development.
If you don't think you have anything to learn from your peers or your managers that can help you in these areas, well... we'll have to agree to disagree.
I believe you are missing the problems that such environment creates.
Back-stabbing, and simply not well thought out events will start to take place.
This is not about the "good" things 360 has in favor, it's about the bad ones that such environment can unleash!
Good feedback from peers I think is critical, but the 360 review process most companies have does not provide introspective and effective feedback.
Your bullet points can be addressed in productive 1-on-1s with your direct report manager and regular check ins between your team and project management to critically discuss recent milestones and what emergent work has been created from them.
I agree with your points, but I feel the formal corporate review process does not sufficiently facilitate them and instead succumb to the pitfalls highlighted where they only focus on the negatives. It is not that I only think reviews are for that, it's that I think those things are a bad end state where formal reviews converge.
The 360 review does not contribute meaningfully toward creating a learning organization. It is not the right mechanism for feedback and reparative methodologies.
We're not building technology. We are building organizations who are building technology. If we are not focusing on the way in which people are doing the work that they are doing as a feature of the actual work, then we are not building a learning organization.
An effort to create continuous feedback is a better gesture than a yearly review, but this article/video is a fluff piece. If the feedback you're getting in a 360 review is in any way new information, then you're not exhibiting the elements that make a good team in the first place.
If you're attempting to aggrandize feedback behind formality and process, even in the name of immediacy, I think it's counterintuitive.
Feedback needs to be a native mechanism that is implicitly built into the way we are working -- not a sidebar conversation. That's what postmortems are for.
Imagine thinking you did a good job all year, only to hear in your review everyone hates your guts -- and you had no idea.
If the critique is fair, timely feedback also gives you a chance to change instead of letting it build up until they hate you. Imagine your wife/husband told you they always hated your cooking. Why not tell me before instead of while we're divorcing?
If you're guaranteed to get feedback, it's always better delivered in a timely fashion.
This seems like an over correction for bad management. A good yearly review should be a quick unsurprising formality because everyone was openly communicating the entire year.
To stretch your analogy... if your spouse doesn't tell you they hate your cooking, that's the real problem: trust and communication. Asking them for feedback after every meal won't help resolve the real problem.
You're right, a good yearly review should be a boring summary of everything you already know.
But often, it's not.
A lot of colleagues and managers are too timid to provide timely feedback, they think they need a formal moment like an annual review to speak up.
Do you believe every single employee and manager has the skillset you describe to be open, honest and trustworthy? If not, then having a system to help shepherd feedback isn't a bad idea.
> Imagine thinking you did a good job all year, only to hear in your review everyone hates your guts -- and you had no idea.
Imagine you talk to your manager and coworkers regularly to get feedback but you don't put the negative feedback into a formal software system that encourages politics and backstabbing!
Why on earth do you believe a formal system would make backstabbing and politics worse?
I'd argue it has the potential to make it better since it creates a papertrail and transparency. I'd rather that than Joe Angry Developer sneakily badmouthing me to my boss or my co-workers behind my back.
Worst case it seems like a lateral move as far as politics goes.
lol... this is so far off the mark. The review system is biased by the employer to manage down compensation except in cases where they identify business critical employees. The politics is about convincing someone you are mission critical.
It creates a situation where you need to have a clean record to advance. So John Shitbird Supervisor can leave some turd in your HR file about your failure to call in sick in 1980 and it's a demerit that travels with you for all time.
These things only matter when you need to justify a raise or cover your ass for a termination.
You have changed from a system where small complaints are usually handled between individuals to a system where people are encouraged to report complaints into a long lived formal system that can be viewed by the management chain as well as by HR.
How would you respond if I file a HR complaint about you or send a complaint to your manager?
Better than if we had just had a quiet word?
Or now rather than blowing off steam by complaining to another colleague that e.g. you don't want to delegate your co-worker will formally report it into a system used to manage compensation and career progression.
Others will game the system and make sure people write lots of positive comments about them. Now when it comes to the next pay cycle I have dozens of positive comments and you have a couple of positives and a few negatives. Guess how that will work out for you?
It encourages people to complain in the heat of the moment.
Etc etc etc.
Not to mention that people who want to badmouth you behind your back still will.
If you have humans, you have politics. You can't escape that. We're not robots.
You're right though that the feedback should not be anonymous, I've seen that in action and it just leads to the kind of Machiavellian scheming you describe.
But if (non-anonymous) colleague writes in a system that she thought I was brusque to her, that I wasn't communicative enough during a project, I'd rather know immediately so we can talk it out rather than have her lob it like a bomb at the end of the year.
> But if (non-anonymous) colleague writes in a system that she thought I was brusque to her, that I wasn't communicative
So if a colleague writes an email to your manager, your managers manager, HR, and to your future manager about your poor handling of an issue you would take that well?
Why would you assume they'd do one (email you) but not the other? If they're upset they're going to do both anyway, you can't stop them.
The point of this system is to get that feedback immediately instead of down the road.
You want to junk review systems completely, OK. But if you're going to have a review system, better to get that info in the moment.
I'd also add that negative feedback of others makes you (the complainer) also look bad, so there's a built-in incentive for career-minded people to be judicious in their response.
I'm unclear if this replaces in any way their existing (annual?) performance review process. Employees do request immediate feedback: it's a major "best practice" and a very common performance improvement area.
Now, usually this takes the form of just talking to your direct reports when you see them do something good or bad. I haven't seen an institutionalized IT system that would do this, nor that those micro-interactions would somehow "add up" to a full performance appraisal.
So this seems to add more friction to giving feedback: never a good thing. And refer also to the whole Amazon "Anytime Feedback" peer feedback tool that turned into political posturing and back-stabbing.
Doesn't sound like it. The video mentions their annual performance review process still being a 'big deal' and that it is still where raises and bonuses are determined.
My guess is it supplements. Ultimately the person managing an employee's development still has to be involved in coaching and formal evaluation. 360s provide data points as well as an opportunity for ongoing improvement rather than saving it all for a once-a-year feedback loop.
The article makes it sound better than what immediately popped into my head, which was employee performance via metrics shown on a Chartbeat-like animated dashboard. Sadly, some media companies are indeed mesmerized by watching article performance via Chartbeat's real-time traffic charts.
Come on, it's yet another HR bullshit vehicle to suck away time and good-will.
Any happy, healthy and productive working group with a manager and directs enjoys an environment where feedback is "realtime" and context sensitive. It has been this way since the dawn of modern workplaces. People got stuff done and companies flourished even without HR-driven company-wide "reviews".
HR departments, unfortunately, aren't satisfied with the annual hoop-jumping exercise that everyone hates but finishes in haste to get it over with. The fashion now is to drag out this process over the whole year. Instead of you and your boss having to "prove" your worth once a year to HR, you now have to do it several times a year, tracked and nagged by a "realtime" system. Goldman Sachs isn't the only company doing this stuff, it's all over the place, sadly.
For once, I would like to see large companies take a step back and reduce the burden of these stupid reviews, but it has only been getting worse and more annoying.
Yea I hate this stuff... No longer is it good enough to work hard, you have to work hard, and then campaign for recognition for it... It should be the job of good management to recognize and foster tallent... but unfortunately, you have to be a good worker and a good politician on your own behalf to get ahead in a lot of corporate environments nowdays.
> No longer is it good enough to work hard, you have to work hard, and then campaign for recognition for it...
I find it interesting that people seem to think that there was a time when this wasn't the case.
I think it is potentially true in a small-group setting. And by that, I mean that magic number around 150 people where you can have a fully-connected network.
The moment you cross that mark, the network can no longer maintain full connection. That is the very same point when signaling worth becomes important. And humans have had organizations larger than 150 people for a very long time.
I've posted before about "meritocracy" being a fairy tale that technical workers need to stop telling themselves:
EDIT: Sorry, was off on Dunbar's number, which is 150. Though I think the constraints required for a desired organization without signaling are a bit heavier -- you need to not only maintain the social network, but also the value of each person.
The semantic and meaning packed in that is deep to the core of unions and the rights of an individual. Not only that, it also unpacks why a meritocracy is wanted when the individual is a genius. I'd think it's one of the best quotes of the year, thus far.
Do you know why companies spend billions on marketing? And why there are a gazillions companies helping people market their brand, product, and services?
Yeah, marketing matters. Take a look at any successful business and see how much they spend on marketing vs product development.
Perhaps, personal career management ought to reflect that ratio.
I respectfully disagree here. Having worked in the industry for many years (now at a startup) the review process was deeply flawed. Because it happened once a year and your bonus was tied to it people always erred on the side of providing 100% positive and thus superficial feedback. There wasn't a mechanism to know where you really stood and how you could get better. I'm not saying this is the solution in itself but the current low touch twice a year process which is minimally invasive is a disaster in my opinion. I think this solution has merit as it takes a page out of Ryan Dalio's Principles which is to shorten the feedback loop as quickly and as much as possible.
What I think would be interesting is to see behaviorial benchmarks for employees that are auto tracked. I sat next to kids that always printed 5+ extra color copies of 100 page presentations just in case. That could cost the desk 20k over the course of the year. banks have no way of knowing if employees are going out of their way to be efficient, save costs, or be productive other than subjective year end measures. bottom line is as someone in the industry I think this is a positive step forward and wanted to throw that in the mix for consideration.
I can respect your experience, and in fact it mirrors mine, in that any review process invented by HR inevitably becomes a broken, gamed system, with limited value.
Where it seems we disagree is on the solution. I don't think adding an even more burdensome artificial review system will fix what is still the same review process, just sped up. They've missed the entire human aspect of how immediate feedback is used/interperted, i.e. how a manager can correct a poor attitude or a deficiency without turning it into an everlasting stigma. As much as HR would like to pretend otherwise, good management is a skill and requires some basic human interaction talent to do correctly.
This will be another failed HR initiative within a year or two, at best. At worst, it'll turn into an episode of Black Mirror. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
Successful "gaming" and "advancing your career" means you have figured out how to work the organization to achieve objectives...that means you know when you are a go-getter, a driver, a supporter, a smoother, a leader :)
I think what's important for Goldman is the quality of feedback that is given. Feedback is so contextual and subjective that there are a lot of variables that could make it difficult to extract the signal from the noise, and increasing the frequency of this would make this worse.
Here's an idea: ongoing bonuses. Money talks. Give managers a pool of money to reward performers as they accomplish things. You can have secondary or committee review for awards, but cut out the endless string of scoring systems and other bullshit.
> another HR bullshit vehicle to suck away time and good-will
One of HR's main functions is to protect the organization from lawsuits. That said, this can be seen as yet another 'quantifiable' way to rationalize promotions and even firings.
At this point I can't tell where the made up busy work HR invents to keep themselves employed starts and where the "real" work they're supposed to be doing begins.
Enterprise HR has become a bloated cost center, which brings almost nothing to the table, except terrible ideas such as this one.
HR, just like any other department, is under pressure to perform better. Given the axiom that you can not improve what you can not observe, they are under pressure to improve their quantifying methods. In itself, it's not bad, but unfortunately we're a very long way from having a meaningful quantification that measures the right things.
Ideally, having a dashboard that can show the real, applicable performance of each employee would go a long way to improve the organizational personnel. People just don't want to consider themselves as a resources; they have feelings and emotions, desires and goals. But at the end, some employees are better than others and improving the quality of the workforce is a significant factor in improving the overall performance of a company.
Because no one can possibly get better at their jobs? Everyone just wants to hide away and quietly keep doing what they were originally hired for? And feedback has no value in helping people improve?
Seriously, I'm baffled by this attitude... yes, I love to hire smart people. And the smartest people? They realize they can learn stuff from other smart people, and that sometimes, those smart people are even their... gasp... managers. Worse, the really smart, driven people may even want to stretch or achieve career goals and don't want to just do the same thing forever! OMG!
Frankly, it's the folks who don't understand this that worry me the most. I've worked with my fair share of talent that believes they're the absolute best at everything they do, no one can possibly teach them anything new, and we should all just leave them alone to achieve greatness in solitude.
Everyone just wants to hide away and quietly keep doing what they were originally hired for? And feedback has no value in helping people improve?
The problem is that you're assuming that there's a level of honest and integrity in HR reviews that just isn't there. HR reviews are fundamentally deciding about who should be promoted and who should be fired. Giving feedback as to how you can get better at your job is, at best, a secondary concern.
That's precisely what I, being considered a star programmer, thought when I was 20. I knew better than anyone, so I wanted to be left alone. I looked down on methods, tools and organizational systems.
Over a decade now and being in charge of 20+ smart people now, I understand how without effective personnel and project management, employees are irrelevant. Now, if you get a smart person that's responsible, driven and methodical enough so they can be effective and contribute without being managed, you just make them a manager for other people so they can make them effective. Skilled managers are a force multiplier.
Unfortunately technical ("smart") skills are often contradictory to management and people skills, so that person is very much a unicorn (but when you find them, it can transform a dysfunctional organization to a performer).
Between having a mediocre managed brilliant group, or a brilliantly managed mediocre group, I know where I'd put my money.
This is about performance reviews and not about managers. Although you can argue effective management does not require managers. What you missed is autonomy. That's the key. Alignment (join the company), autonomy (trust), effectiveness (facilitate).
Effective management requires managers, it just doesn't say how many managers (just one at the top, or many levels). But someone has to set the tone.
Trust is not enough. People need to be guided, synchronized and harmonized. It doesn't happen well in a flat, distributed system. A good employee receives autonomy, a great employee often receives control over other employees. But autonomy is not independence; it still requires a guiding hand, which is management.
I understand your intent, but it's really hard to quantify human performance in a complex workplace. It's not just that we're "a very long way from having meaningful quantification". I mean, it is _instrinsically_ a subjective matter. No "dashboard" is going work, IMHO.
How is human performance at work "strictly objective" -- lines of code? number of tickets closed? Customer/peer reviews? Number of unknown disasters averted because of diligence and focus? Number of hapless interns mentored who will, years later, become star players?
Unless one is in sales, performance can't be boiled down to a number or two for any individual. Even then, there could be questions.
That's precisely what I claim: that it's very difficult to measure. Yet it doesn't say it's not objective. It's not subjective, as is a matter of taste; it's a matter of fitting the requirements of the mission or organization.
Looking at it in other professions, it can be easy to say who's a better mover - they transport more items in a given time, with less property damage. Or better plumbers, or better painters. Or better investment bankers. Or indeed, better salespeople. If it's possible for those professions, it can also apply to IT.
If anything, it's exactly the opposite. Performance measurement of developers is an extremely subjective endeavor. One strict objective metric either doesn't exist or is unfeasible to measure.
Maybe your point is to say that "performance is objective but performance metrics are subjective" — sure, I agree. But I'm not sure what that adds.
It sounds like the infamous Bridgewater hedge fund's tablet-based employee review app. You can be having a conversation with someone while they're casually rating your performance. To be honest, I'd actually like to get that kind of data about what people think of me.
Pardon my ingrained reaction to the Christmas tree metrics.
When I was back in corporate land, real, ongoing feedback and a real conversation would have been useful. But, it all came down to the yearly ritual and basically fitting people into the slots (including pay increases / pre-defined budget) that were available.
Maybe Goldman Sachs will come up with something else, but with respect to "real time" reviews, I can't help thinking of the old expression:
"What have you done for me, lately?"
On the other hand, to re-introduce the sarcasm, it couldn't happen to a nicer group of people.
I've never been through a performance review before (currently a college student), but I'm curious: what distinguishes a good conversation about your performance from a bad conversation? Do you receive a plan of action? Is it the way that the conversation is conducted?
There are many things that could be said, I guess, but a good and concise summary would be, "Trust your gut reaction."
If/When you get into such meetings, if you feel uncomfortable -- not that you have goals to meet, but with respect to the natures of the goals, measurements, and feedback, itself -- trust your reaction.
In my corporate experience, all of this ultimately goes to serve Human Resources (HR). And, contrary to the impression some newer employees can have and that HR itself often fosters, HR DOES NOT serve the interest of the employee. They are there solely to staff and to protect the organization.
Much of the performance review process serves to produce documentation they can subsequently use to justify whatever action they decide to take. Note that such actions may not actually correspond or respond to your real performance.
Hopefully, you'll end up with a good manager that will help you grow and understand the system. But, that is your direct management. THAT is the critical decision.
I had one manager who was like that. Things were good, until they early-retired him out. I basically consolidated the work of a 5 department team down to one person -- me -- as we continued to go through layoffs. Done in substantially less time and with substantially less errors, more flexibility, and a complete change-over, with much greater complexity and variability, in the underlying data.
I received an award. And another time, that manager, before he was retired out, just showed up at my desk one day with an unsolicited 12% raise, because "I was doing the work." In the midst of a company-wide pay freeze.
But when they were done with me, I received a very cold stare from our HR manager as I passed her in the hall one day, and the next I was out.
Trust your gut. Not any "performance review" process. You need to respond to and manage the process, as it unfolds. But you trust your gut.
P.S. Yes, I should have gotten out a lot sooner. I had basically become a "workaholic" to avoid a lousy home circumstance and personal life. Another lesson to learn and avoid.
I think it's fair that employees are given regular feedback throughout the year, instead of it be withheld until evaluation time and not have opportunities to correct.
I think it's also fair that the feedback mechanism is bi-directional.
However, what concerns me about this is, managers with lower-performing employees may get dinged harsher than managers with top performers.
In large companies with many teams, this will require a bit of digging to uncover this factor. What is manager's recourse without looking like he or she is throwing his/her team members under the bus?
One would think HR would be against something that introduces constant stress in the workforce rather than introduce it.
It comes across as a company obsessed with getting the maximum possible output from their workforce like from a machine but quite not sure how to pull it off from human beings.
The obvious next step is to create a real-time market for employee performance reviews, allowing employees to bet on and against their and other employees' performance reviews and possibly even trade derivatives priced based on baskets of rising or falling performance reviews.
There would be many benefits. For starters, having a liquid, efficient market for performance reviews in which employees are able to bet on each others' reviews with minimal frictional costs would unleash market forces that would keep the performance reviews accurate (right?). But the really big payoff would come down the road, when this market could be opened to external investors like the venerable firm that manages your Aunt Tilly's pension plan, generating new sources of trading revenues for Goldman.
My employer tried and failed using a similar system with Salesforce Work.com. It all seemed a bit pointless and forced to me. In the early days of using it while it was still a novelty, managers were giving feedback to people so that they could demonstrate to HR that they were being good little soldiers by using the tool, rather than because they wanted to praise good performance. This insincere praise was worse than no feedback at all.
In the end, it never really went anywhere because it became another inbox to check, and we already have too many of those. A chicken-and-egg problem also presented itself, where people only checked the site when they got a notification saying they'd received feedback, which led to no-one visiting the site to give feedback.
It's a terrible idea. Please don't even think about building it.
As another poster mentioned real time feedback between team members and leaders happens organically (if the people are any good). The HR annual or bi-annual review is a formalization and documentation step but I can't imagine usually leads to better performance.
I think (and maybe this is a flawed premise) that most folks desire genuine, helpful feedback (or perhaps more generally what other people think about them). However, it seems like folks have difficulty when being on the giving end of the feedback, which makes tools for real-time feedback a one-sided marketplace. I could hypothesize a few reasons (i.e, feedback taken the wrong way could damage interpersonal relationships, feedback is awkward to give to a colleague, feedback is based on a sliver of the full-picture of an employee's performance, etc.), but I'd like to know y'all's opinions on the matter.
What seems to be a part of the problem is also how nebulous workplace interactions are when administrated by HR. It's awkward and unnatural to ask a close friend to "describe something that <other close friend> has done well." Most of the time when I give feedback about someone, it's a reaction to something that that person did that I observed. Having such an open-ended review in annual performance reviews seems to create a breeding ground for feedback that isn't helpful, and asking those questions constantly like Goldman and a lot of other companies are trying to do serves only to exacerbate the problem.
They're crooks whom subvert democracy and exploit people and businesses with obsfucated trickery. Who cares? Next financial crisis brought closer because coworker competition in performance reviews means legitimized stealing even more money, faster.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] thread...and the employees "wanted" this? I doubt it.
Seriously, did I misinterpret this? Not trying to be a troll.
If you're going to get 360 feedback, wouldn't you prefer to have it in a timely fashion instead of getting blindsided monthly, quarterly, or yearly?
Or is the very concept of a 360 where you have issues?
We need to be focusing on the context around failures and what the factors were in a situation where a person's actions contributed to a failure. Why did what they were doing make sense to them at the time?
This isn't captured in a 360 review cycle, nor this particular one. I just don't think it fits the tech paradigm of blamelessness/blame-aware at all.
I am struggling to find any reasonable point in this process. Performance reviews in general are more formality than anything in my opinion. At the end of the day I can gauge how my impact is respected across a company on a mgmt/executive level by the money that lands in my bank account. The review cycle from mgmt really does not address any other intricacies.
You've described basically any feedback mechanism at all. Cooldown time or not, a 360 feedback system only works in a culture that enables it. The feedback will be toxic if the culture is toxic. The timeliness of the feedback isn't likely to change that.
> Performance reviews in general are more formality than anything in my opinion.
Ah, and now we come right to it. You don't actually believe in a system of employee evaluation.
That's your opinion. You're free to have it, but it implies that feedback is not a path to skill or career development, and I deeply and fundamentally disagree with that premise.
> At the end of the day I can gauge how my impact is respected across a company on a mgmt/executive level by the money that lands in my bank account.
If you think that's all that reviews are about--gauging impact, ascribing blame, or simply analyzing failures--you're already missing the point.
Feedback is about many things:
* Identifying and lauding successes.
* Feedback to address performance concerns.
* Feedback for skill improvement.
* Feedback for career development.
If you don't think you have anything to learn from your peers or your managers that can help you in these areas, well... we'll have to agree to disagree.
Your bullet points can be addressed in productive 1-on-1s with your direct report manager and regular check ins between your team and project management to critically discuss recent milestones and what emergent work has been created from them.
I agree with your points, but I feel the formal corporate review process does not sufficiently facilitate them and instead succumb to the pitfalls highlighted where they only focus on the negatives. It is not that I only think reviews are for that, it's that I think those things are a bad end state where formal reviews converge.
The 360 review does not contribute meaningfully toward creating a learning organization. It is not the right mechanism for feedback and reparative methodologies.
We're not building technology. We are building organizations who are building technology. If we are not focusing on the way in which people are doing the work that they are doing as a feature of the actual work, then we are not building a learning organization.
An effort to create continuous feedback is a better gesture than a yearly review, but this article/video is a fluff piece. If the feedback you're getting in a 360 review is in any way new information, then you're not exhibiting the elements that make a good team in the first place.
If you're attempting to aggrandize feedback behind formality and process, even in the name of immediacy, I think it's counterintuitive.
Feedback needs to be a native mechanism that is implicitly built into the way we are working -- not a sidebar conversation. That's what postmortems are for.
Feedback is important.
Negative formal feedback... not so much.
If the critique is fair, timely feedback also gives you a chance to change instead of letting it build up until they hate you. Imagine your wife/husband told you they always hated your cooking. Why not tell me before instead of while we're divorcing?
If you're guaranteed to get feedback, it's always better delivered in a timely fashion.
To stretch your analogy... if your spouse doesn't tell you they hate your cooking, that's the real problem: trust and communication. Asking them for feedback after every meal won't help resolve the real problem.
But often, it's not.
A lot of colleagues and managers are too timid to provide timely feedback, they think they need a formal moment like an annual review to speak up.
Do you believe every single employee and manager has the skillset you describe to be open, honest and trustworthy? If not, then having a system to help shepherd feedback isn't a bad idea.
Imagine you talk to your manager and coworkers regularly to get feedback but you don't put the negative feedback into a formal software system that encourages politics and backstabbing!
I'd argue it has the potential to make it better since it creates a papertrail and transparency. I'd rather that than Joe Angry Developer sneakily badmouthing me to my boss or my co-workers behind my back.
Worst case it seems like a lateral move as far as politics goes.
These things only matter when you need to justify a raise or cover your ass for a termination.
How would you respond if I file a HR complaint about you or send a complaint to your manager?
Better than if we had just had a quiet word?
Or now rather than blowing off steam by complaining to another colleague that e.g. you don't want to delegate your co-worker will formally report it into a system used to manage compensation and career progression.
Others will game the system and make sure people write lots of positive comments about them. Now when it comes to the next pay cycle I have dozens of positive comments and you have a couple of positives and a few negatives. Guess how that will work out for you?
It encourages people to complain in the heat of the moment.
Etc etc etc.
Not to mention that people who want to badmouth you behind your back still will.
You're right though that the feedback should not be anonymous, I've seen that in action and it just leads to the kind of Machiavellian scheming you describe.
But if (non-anonymous) colleague writes in a system that she thought I was brusque to her, that I wasn't communicative enough during a project, I'd rather know immediately so we can talk it out rather than have her lob it like a bomb at the end of the year.
So if a colleague writes an email to your manager, your managers manager, HR, and to your future manager about your poor handling of an issue you would take that well?
Better than to an email addressed just to you?
The point of this system is to get that feedback immediately instead of down the road.
You want to junk review systems completely, OK. But if you're going to have a review system, better to get that info in the moment.
I'd also add that negative feedback of others makes you (the complainer) also look bad, so there's a built-in incentive for career-minded people to be judicious in their response.
Now, usually this takes the form of just talking to your direct reports when you see them do something good or bad. I haven't seen an institutionalized IT system that would do this, nor that those micro-interactions would somehow "add up" to a full performance appraisal.
So this seems to add more friction to giving feedback: never a good thing. And refer also to the whole Amazon "Anytime Feedback" peer feedback tool that turned into political posturing and back-stabbing.
http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-reportedly-s...
back to the golden age of terrible ideas
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Any happy, healthy and productive working group with a manager and directs enjoys an environment where feedback is "realtime" and context sensitive. It has been this way since the dawn of modern workplaces. People got stuff done and companies flourished even without HR-driven company-wide "reviews".
HR departments, unfortunately, aren't satisfied with the annual hoop-jumping exercise that everyone hates but finishes in haste to get it over with. The fashion now is to drag out this process over the whole year. Instead of you and your boss having to "prove" your worth once a year to HR, you now have to do it several times a year, tracked and nagged by a "realtime" system. Goldman Sachs isn't the only company doing this stuff, it's all over the place, sadly.
For once, I would like to see large companies take a step back and reduce the burden of these stupid reviews, but it has only been getting worse and more annoying.
I find it interesting that people seem to think that there was a time when this wasn't the case.
I think it is potentially true in a small-group setting. And by that, I mean that magic number around 150 people where you can have a fully-connected network.
The moment you cross that mark, the network can no longer maintain full connection. That is the very same point when signaling worth becomes important. And humans have had organizations larger than 150 people for a very long time.
I've posted before about "meritocracy" being a fairy tale that technical workers need to stop telling themselves:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10978841#10980628
EDIT: Sorry, was off on Dunbar's number, which is 150. Though I think the constraints required for a desired organization without signaling are a bit heavier -- you need to not only maintain the social network, but also the value of each person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
"An infernal situation. There is no solidarity in a meritocracy, and no reward for merit with solidarity."
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14022296)
The semantic and meaning packed in that is deep to the core of unions and the rights of an individual. Not only that, it also unpacks why a meritocracy is wanted when the individual is a genius. I'd think it's one of the best quotes of the year, thus far.
Yeah, marketing matters. Take a look at any successful business and see how much they spend on marketing vs product development.
Perhaps, personal career management ought to reflect that ratio.
Unfortunately, having an HR department mediate the experience for you in a shitty way on your behalf is not a very rewarding experience!
What I think would be interesting is to see behaviorial benchmarks for employees that are auto tracked. I sat next to kids that always printed 5+ extra color copies of 100 page presentations just in case. That could cost the desk 20k over the course of the year. banks have no way of knowing if employees are going out of their way to be efficient, save costs, or be productive other than subjective year end measures. bottom line is as someone in the industry I think this is a positive step forward and wanted to throw that in the mix for consideration.
Where it seems we disagree is on the solution. I don't think adding an even more burdensome artificial review system will fix what is still the same review process, just sped up. They've missed the entire human aspect of how immediate feedback is used/interperted, i.e. how a manager can correct a poor attitude or a deficiency without turning it into an everlasting stigma. As much as HR would like to pretend otherwise, good management is a skill and requires some basic human interaction talent to do correctly.
This will be another failed HR initiative within a year or two, at best. At worst, it'll turn into an episode of Black Mirror. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
That's how it always worked.
One of HR's main functions is to protect the organization from lawsuits. That said, this can be seen as yet another 'quantifiable' way to rationalize promotions and even firings.
Enterprise HR has become a bloated cost center, which brings almost nothing to the table, except terrible ideas such as this one.
Ideally, having a dashboard that can show the real, applicable performance of each employee would go a long way to improve the organizational personnel. People just don't want to consider themselves as a resources; they have feelings and emotions, desires and goals. But at the end, some employees are better than others and improving the quality of the workforce is a significant factor in improving the overall performance of a company.
Seriously, I'm baffled by this attitude... yes, I love to hire smart people. And the smartest people? They realize they can learn stuff from other smart people, and that sometimes, those smart people are even their... gasp... managers. Worse, the really smart, driven people may even want to stretch or achieve career goals and don't want to just do the same thing forever! OMG!
Frankly, it's the folks who don't understand this that worry me the most. I've worked with my fair share of talent that believes they're the absolute best at everything they do, no one can possibly teach them anything new, and we should all just leave them alone to achieve greatness in solitude.
They're a nightmare.
The problem is that you're assuming that there's a level of honest and integrity in HR reviews that just isn't there. HR reviews are fundamentally deciding about who should be promoted and who should be fired. Giving feedback as to how you can get better at your job is, at best, a secondary concern.
Over a decade now and being in charge of 20+ smart people now, I understand how without effective personnel and project management, employees are irrelevant. Now, if you get a smart person that's responsible, driven and methodical enough so they can be effective and contribute without being managed, you just make them a manager for other people so they can make them effective. Skilled managers are a force multiplier. Unfortunately technical ("smart") skills are often contradictory to management and people skills, so that person is very much a unicorn (but when you find them, it can transform a dysfunctional organization to a performer).
Between having a mediocre managed brilliant group, or a brilliantly managed mediocre group, I know where I'd put my money.
Trust is not enough. People need to be guided, synchronized and harmonized. It doesn't happen well in a flat, distributed system. A good employee receives autonomy, a great employee often receives control over other employees. But autonomy is not independence; it still requires a guiding hand, which is management.
The company supposedly wants to purge the ineffective, but they also want to make sure that managers don't get too entrepreneurial.
Unless one is in sales, performance can't be boiled down to a number or two for any individual. Even then, there could be questions.
Looking at it in other professions, it can be easy to say who's a better mover - they transport more items in a given time, with less property damage. Or better plumbers, or better painters. Or better investment bankers. Or indeed, better salespeople. If it's possible for those professions, it can also apply to IT.
Maybe your point is to say that "performance is objective but performance metrics are subjective" — sure, I agree. But I'm not sure what that adds.
Bit of a tangent but worth the short read
I've seen more than a few HR departments that seemed to feel they should be running the whole company.
And I haven't seen one capable of running a gumball machine.
Danger! Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!
Pardon my ingrained reaction to the Christmas tree metrics.
When I was back in corporate land, real, ongoing feedback and a real conversation would have been useful. But, it all came down to the yearly ritual and basically fitting people into the slots (including pay increases / pre-defined budget) that were available.
Maybe Goldman Sachs will come up with something else, but with respect to "real time" reviews, I can't help thinking of the old expression:
"What have you done for me, lately?"
On the other hand, to re-introduce the sarcasm, it couldn't happen to a nicer group of people.
If/When you get into such meetings, if you feel uncomfortable -- not that you have goals to meet, but with respect to the natures of the goals, measurements, and feedback, itself -- trust your reaction.
In my corporate experience, all of this ultimately goes to serve Human Resources (HR). And, contrary to the impression some newer employees can have and that HR itself often fosters, HR DOES NOT serve the interest of the employee. They are there solely to staff and to protect the organization.
Much of the performance review process serves to produce documentation they can subsequently use to justify whatever action they decide to take. Note that such actions may not actually correspond or respond to your real performance.
Hopefully, you'll end up with a good manager that will help you grow and understand the system. But, that is your direct management. THAT is the critical decision.
I had one manager who was like that. Things were good, until they early-retired him out. I basically consolidated the work of a 5 department team down to one person -- me -- as we continued to go through layoffs. Done in substantially less time and with substantially less errors, more flexibility, and a complete change-over, with much greater complexity and variability, in the underlying data.
I received an award. And another time, that manager, before he was retired out, just showed up at my desk one day with an unsolicited 12% raise, because "I was doing the work." In the midst of a company-wide pay freeze.
But when they were done with me, I received a very cold stare from our HR manager as I passed her in the hall one day, and the next I was out.
Trust your gut. Not any "performance review" process. You need to respond to and manage the process, as it unfolds. But you trust your gut.
P.S. Yes, I should have gotten out a lot sooner. I had basically become a "workaholic" to avoid a lousy home circumstance and personal life. Another lesson to learn and avoid.
I think it's also fair that the feedback mechanism is bi-directional.
However, what concerns me about this is, managers with lower-performing employees may get dinged harsher than managers with top performers.
In large companies with many teams, this will require a bit of digging to uncover this factor. What is manager's recourse without looking like he or she is throwing his/her team members under the bus?
It comes across as a company obsessed with getting the maximum possible output from their workforce like from a machine but quite not sure how to pull it off from human beings.
There would be many benefits. For starters, having a liquid, efficient market for performance reviews in which employees are able to bet on each others' reviews with minimal frictional costs would unleash market forces that would keep the performance reviews accurate (right?). But the really big payoff would come down the road, when this market could be opened to external investors like the venerable firm that manages your Aunt Tilly's pension plan, generating new sources of trading revenues for Goldman.
In all seriousness, I'm not sure real-time performance reviews are a good idea. They immediately bring to mind the societal nightmare of Black Mirror's "Nose Dive" episode: http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/13379204/black-mirror-sea...
In the end, it never really went anywhere because it became another inbox to check, and we already have too many of those. A chicken-and-egg problem also presented itself, where people only checked the site when they got a notification saying they'd received feedback, which led to no-one visiting the site to give feedback.
As another poster mentioned real time feedback between team members and leaders happens organically (if the people are any good). The HR annual or bi-annual review is a formalization and documentation step but I can't imagine usually leads to better performance.
What seems to be a part of the problem is also how nebulous workplace interactions are when administrated by HR. It's awkward and unnatural to ask a close friend to "describe something that <other close friend> has done well." Most of the time when I give feedback about someone, it's a reaction to something that that person did that I observed. Having such an open-ended review in annual performance reviews seems to create a breeding ground for feedback that isn't helpful, and asking those questions constantly like Goldman and a lot of other companies are trying to do serves only to exacerbate the problem.