Insights on Performance Reviews: Week of November 18, 2019
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I’ve been researching the performance review process and talking to customers about what they like and don’t like about the process. Here are the key insights from the week of November 18, 2019:
B is an mid-career individual contributor at a Fortune 500 company. His self-evaluation is due next week. He also needs to lock-in his 2020 goals by January. They use Workday for evaluations (along with his two previous companies). At his current company, Workday simply asks for qualitative evaluations, so his skip level manager (on his own) asks his team to fill out a supplemental 3 page Google Sheet (proprietary, customized, takes 5 minutes) to rate on a 5-point scale across dimensions the skip-level cares about such as integrity, passion, and encouraging others. A few insights from our discussion:
Skip level manager wants performance reviews to be more quantitative.
B’s biggest challenges when doing his self-evaluation: 1) tell the story that articulates his accomplishments well, 2) minimize manager’s bias (e.g. recency effect, boss may not remember the “little” things that he did [partially because there was a boss transition], and 3) hope the quant scores from his peers are good (had a side conversation about trying to influence peer scores).
Also mentioned his concern that his peer has the “high-profile” engagements while his engagements weren’t.
We also had a discussion about manager’s ability to give feedback, which he rated it as “above average.” He mentioned that on a related note, his kids’ teachers gave “excellent” feedback primarily because it was in-line w/ his (parents’) observations and it was detailed with examples, situations, etc. Our guess is that in his school district, his teachers simply care a lot about doing reviews well.
J is a mid-level executive at Amazon with nearly 10 years of experience there. They are on twice a year reviews: February (annual) and August (mid-year). The reviews are focused on the 14 AMZN Leadership Principles.
When J first started, the perf review process was heavy. Most individuals would block time off in January to complete 40 reviews. It felt like it took about 30 minutes to complete each one.
Beth Galetti instituted a new process that was like a 140 character Tweet process. It saved time, but it wasn’t thoughtful.
Now it’s somewhere between super quick and more thoughtful. It takes about 15 minutes to complete. But it’s still not perfect.
J created an additional template to supplement the default corporate performance review process: he asks his team’s peers to vote on each member of the team. The voters can choose three leadership principles that best exemplify that team member. And then choose three leadership principles that least exemplify that team member. J then reveals the results to team member, comparing against their self-assessment. Team members like it because of the self-awareness.
Net-net, when I heard were the key challenges for J when it came to the performance review process (in order):
Need to save time
Grow people
Help team members gain self-awareness
Use it as a precursor to a PIP
A few more things I found interesting:
There’s an internal career planning tool called “Genie.” It asks questions like:
What do you want to work on?
What are your superpowers?
He felt Amazon does a very good job in setting leveling guidelines.
J felt that the review quality depended on the manager and how thoughtful they are.
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