Just out of curiosity. I have no moral stance on it, if a tool works for you I’m definitely not judging anyone for using it. Do whatever you can to get your work done!
Just out of curiosity. I have no moral stance on it, if a tool works for you I’m definitely not judging anyone for using it. Do whatever you can to get your work done!
I use it to write performance reviews because in reality HR has already decided the results before the evaluations.
I’m not wasting my valuable time writing text that is then ignored. If you want a promotion, get a new job.
To be clear: I don’t support this but it’s the reality I live in.
This is exactly what I use it for. I have to write a lot of justifications for stuff like taking training, buying equipment, going on business travel, etc. - text that will never be seriously read by anyone and is just a check-the-box exercise. The quality and content of the writing is unimportant as long as it contains a few buzz-phrases.
Just chiming in as another person who does this, it’s absolutely perfect. I just copy and paste the company bs competencies, add in a few bs thoughts of my own, and tell it to churn out a full review reinforcing how they comply with the listed competencies.
It’s perfect, just the kinda bs HR is looking for, I get compliments all the time for them rofl.
Work smarter, not harder, lol.
Can you please elaborate on your experience of HR people deciding the results before the evaluation? Just curious
Sure!
It happens behind closed doors and never in writing to keep up the farce, but usually I’m given a paltry number of slots of people I can label as high performers. This is really a damn shame because most of my team members are great employees. This is used as a carrot to show that we do give raises and promotions after all, but the proportion is so small it’s effectively zero. I’m very clear to my team that trying to becoming a top performer to get a promotion is a bad investment. I do my best to communicate the futility without actually saying it literally in such a way that it could get me into trouble.
Next, they use a spreadsheet to figure who they can probably underpay based on a heuristic likelihood that person would actually leave vs current market rates. These automatically become the low performers ahem satisfactory. You’re penalized for being here longer or specializing in something with a small market. Everyone else falls somewhere between satisfactory and above average which makes little difference.
The performance reviews are merely weak documentation to show that somehow HR was “justified” by selectively highlighting strengths or weaknesses depending on the a priori decision of what your performance level was to be.
It’s a huge tautology with only one meaningful conclusion: you will be underpaid, and it gets worse over time.
Thanks. This is great insight and tracks with some personal experience or experience of friends.
You could make a whole post about this topic, but I was curious what’s your advice to an employee that wants to do good work, but who doesn’t want to be taken advantage of?
The truth is you have to do good work for yourself because you care about the quality of your work. You work for you.
You separate the factors. You do good work for you because you care because a life doing things you don’t care about is less meaningful.
Separately you look at pay. You leave when it’s no longer worth staying, which for most people is about every two to three years at least for your early career.