Performance reviews!!

[ursweetsacrfice]

Hi all...I am doing a report for college about why employees object to performance reviews. If you aren't too busy, please respond to why you would object or do not like performance reviews...I would SO appreciate it!!

thank you!
Jennifer

[Rapscallion]

I'm in an unusual situation. I'm a member of a worker's coop and we have peer review in a flat hierarchy, so the review isn't really that serious - well, to some. It's a chance to see where you can improve and what your colleagues think of you. It's not a sackable offence to get a bad review, unless you have several terrible ones in a row and don't meet the member's job description. That's when personnel get really interested.

Rapscallion

[wagegoth]

My main objection is that reviews are often prepared and given by people who don't work with you, unlike Raps situation. They don't see you on a daily basis, they often only hear complaints, they don't investigate these complaints, they don't make a real effort to interview the people who do know you, and they bring things up in a written review that will go permanently in your personnel file things that should have been brought up to you before.

Even if the people you work with and for give you an excellent review, many companies will push to get one complaint or bit of unhappiness, then use that to reduce your raise.

If you have to do a self-review, the questions are often not applicable to your position (prepared by someone who has no real knowledge of what you do), and don't necessarily touch on the areas you are doing well in, or do not let you add comments.

I think a major complaint is that reviews, instead of helping you and your supervisor make decisions and work toward improving you and your job (as originally intended), have simply become another method companies use to manipulate, abuse, degrade and deny their employees.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

The big problem I have with them is everybody gets rated the same--mostly average, maybe above on some things, but then below average on others to make it all balance out.

And everybody therefore gets the same raise--25 cents.

There are some people who bust their asses, never miss a shift and really go out of their way to give great customer service, take care of whatever needs doing, and suggest ways to make things easier or more efficient. They get rated the same as the potted plants who skate by doing the absolute minimum to keep their jobs and the people who blow off most of their shifts but somehow never get fired for it.

[katie kaboom]

I had my performance review a few months back...everyone in my department did. My company gives you a performance review for every 500 hours you've worked. My last one, the manager put, for me and a co-worker, that we exceeded expectations in all categories (well ok, except for credit, in my case.)
So anyway, apparently they have to send off the performance reviews to corporate for them to approve....well corporate sent the reviews back and told our manager that she couldn't give us all those "exceeds expectations." Why? Because they base your raise on whether you meet, exceed, or fall short of their expectations. Because the company didn't want to shell out the extra money for all "exceeds expectations", our manager had to change them all to "meets expectations". So i got a whopping 25 cent an hour raise from that. My coworker, who only beat me in credit, only got a 35 cent an hour raise. And that right there folks, is my problem with these performance reviews. Basically they boil down to what corporate wants to hear, regardless of how well a particular employee performs their job.

[thegiraffe]

If I may play devil's advocate here for a minute (that, and it's always important to include the other side in an academic paper):

I absolutely LOVE getting my evaluation. Why? Because I work hard when I'm there (I teach, so retail is my second job), I'm friendly, and I go out of my way to meet/exceed expectations. I'm constantly cheery (wide-awake is more like it), bouncy, and I'm knowledgeable in the day-to-day operation of the store. I know I do a good job, and it's nice to have that acknowledged.

I work for Publix. At Publix, we're reviewed by our immediate manager. On my last evaluation, I got a .50 raise, but I got a .75 on the one before that (partially to bring me up to where I should be after 5 years with the company for a number of reasons), but I earned it. Therefore, my bringing-both-sides-together evaluation of performance reviews is that employee should be directly reviewed by someone familiar with their work, and even them. It makes a huge difference to be reviewed by someone who really KNOWS you and how you operate. However, corporate needs to ensure that employees aren't being stiffed because they don't want to shell out the money. Honestly, it will cost a lot less in the long run to have a (relatively) high-paid, well-trained, happy staff for a longer period of time than higher turnover but at lower wages. It costs and insane amount of money to hire and train someone, and that is more than what it would cost to keep the higher-paid staff.

*off soapbox*

[Gurndigarn]

I'm going to mostly repeat what others have said-- in too many places, HR and/or upper operations management have nothing to do with the rank-and-file employees. And that disassociation brings an equal disassociation in their mindsets between how they treat their employees and employee satisfaction.

They see employees as human resources. Resources. Things to be used, gotten the most out of... and discarded if needed. They lose the Human part of the equation.

In the perfect world, companies would notice that good employees earn them more money than bad employees. For example, I left one store to manage another in the same chain. I came in at mid-year, and we were running 15% below the prior year. By the end of the year, we were nearly flat-- meaning that I ran figures almost 15% up for the half year I took over, or 30% better than the idiot before me. So, just by changing the manager, the place started earning $XX,000 more per year. (Numbers kept out because I still work for the company, and it's not fair to them to take their money and splash earning figures out on the internet... but I increased their annual profit by more than they paid me in a year.)

Also in this perfect world, upper management would realize that they want to keep those harder-working/better-working employees happy. So performance reviews would be to analyze how each person is doing-- IE, how much better do we do with this person than with a rank newcomer off the street-- then give them a portion of that additional money so that they want to stay.

In the real world, though, that disassociation I mentioned comes into play. Management and HR want to keep costs down. Labor is a cost-- in most places, a big cost. So instead of reviews being something to reward good employees, they're used, as someone else said, to bludgeon employees. After all, most of them will stick around anyway, and "we can always replace those who leave...."

Replace, yes, but this is a case of penny-wise, pound-foolish. Tick off a good manager at a big-box store, and you could be looking at millions of dollars per year decrease in profits as customers look for better service. Annoy the expert foreman at your factory, and the output from that line can drop 10%. AND STAY THERE, mind you, because some people just understand the way things work better than the guy you hire off the street. All because you didn't want to pony up an extra $500 per year for a valuable employee. Even losing a good rank-and-file employee at a retail place means that his replacement takes 15% longer to do the job... wouldn't it have been better to give the first employee a 4% pay jump instead?

In my case, they did increase my pay (usually giving me additional responsibilities during all the big pay jumps) and I was generally happy on that score-- up until upper management changed, and then pay increases started becoming fewer and further between, even though I was doing special assignments to pull the company's keister out of a few fires. What's the result of that? I've started to refuse extra work. I no longer fear being fired from this job. And I'm keeping my eyes open, my resume has been updated, and if I wasn't being picky about what I was looking for, I would have a new job by now-- at a pay increase, in all probability.

Employee loyalty runs both directions. Most employees would be much more loyal to their employers if their employers were more loyal to them.

[CaroPhoenix]

In all my jobs, save 1, my employee reviews were exemplory. (If I had wanted to work fast food for the rest of my life, I would have stayed with Roy Rogers and I could now be a manager of my own restaurant and maybe even a DM by now).

The one job that gave me a doesn't meet anything on this sheet - my boss who filled it out was an idiot. She NEVER gave me any indication that she was unhappy with my work, never told me that anyone else was unhappy with my work. (One of the people who complained about me NEVER gave me work to do and therefore didn't know my work standards because he always asked the other administrative assistant to do his work for him), she never gave me direction on how to do my job to her satisfaction. When my 6 month review came up (it was actually 2-3 months LATE), everything was thrown at me at once. HR wasn't any better. Their stance was: "If your manager thinks this way, then it's the correct way, doesn't matter if you can back up that it's wrong, it's right in our eyes." I left the company shortly afterwards.

It took a long time coming, but Karma finally bit my old manager in the ass. The multi-million dollar project she was in charge of - she was let go as manager for it. Plus, she was demoted within the company.

[BlaqueKatt]

I get dragged down on mine every time on "does not communicate well with other employees"

well let's see why shall we:

1-I'm Autistic
2-I do 3-4 times the work my coworkers do(and I have the numbers to back that up)
3-because I don't spend my day "chit-chatting" I get more work done, but I'm not "communicating with my coworkers"
4-one of my coworkers has threatened me and it took threatening a lawsuit to get anything done about it-they moved him 4 desks down-so when he talks about me I can't hear it.
5-I get very stressed out doing the work of 4 people when there are 6 other people on the team, and I am vocal to management about the cause of my stress.
6-several of the floor agents have "crushes" on me for whatever insane reason(I'm not friendly at all anymore, too much work to do and it keeps getting piled on)
7-My coworkers all "hang out" outside of work, but because one of them has been shot down by me(he told me he loved me-and I reminded him I loved my husband), I'm never invited-to anything.

so because of the above mentioned list I get my review knocked down every damn time-basically due to circumstances beyond my control. I do my job better than any of my counterparts, take on extra tasks constantly, all the managers love me, and my work ethic(2.5 years of employment and 2.5 missed days-other than requested vacation, 1 week when I got married, and half days when I have doctor's appointments), but the higher ups don't care.

[KellyHabersham]

The only issues I've had with a performance review have been at Macy's, and it had nothing to do with my supervisor......it's because of the whole thing with corporate holding us sales associates responsible for credit, and it's not like we can force people to use their cards or to sign up for one if they don't wish to. Plus the whole bit with sales goals, I feel this creates alot of problems with people getting territorial and wanting to take as many of the sales as they can.

[katie kaboom]

Plus the whole bit with sales goals, I feel this creates alot of problems with people getting territorial and wanting to take as many of the sales as they can.

Doesn't work on me cause i don't really give a crap. I can pretty much guarantee they're not gonna fire me cause i don't get a lot of credit apps, and i leave the registers up to other people whenever i can. However, i bust my ass on that sales floor to get stuff done, and they know it.

But yeah, as far as that crap goes, Macy's pretty much sucks.

[KellyHabersham]

well, I was just speaking from what my manager had told me during my performance review, and the bad experience I had when I'd picked up an open shift in the Macy Woman/Petites area. The two associates who were regulars there all but said they didn't need/want me in their area, one was outright rude to me, so I didn't even last two hours before I just left and went downstairs to my "home" department and stayed there the rest of the shift. And one of my co-workers there thinks the two women in the other area acted that way because of sales goals.....they'd rather be rude and unfriendly rather than risk sales going to someone else.

[Catwoman2965]

Performance reviews...where to begin.

I think they are a good tool, IF they are done right. One of the biggest mistakes that managers make is to "save up" things about employees, and wait for the annual review to discuss them. That is so wrong on so many levels. If there are performance issues, they need to be addressed when they are occuring, not 9 months later at review time. I think a lot of times employees look at review time as "oh no, can't wait to hear how i've screwed up THIS time"

Communication is also key; both the employee and supervisor should be able to contribute input to the reviews. I know my co, and my boss, have me prepare a list of accomplishments from the past year, both including my annual objectives, and anything else I might have done. He then takes that and prepares my review. It also helps if the person actually giving the review works with you, and knows you, otherwise its pointless.

And as far as your supervisor giving you one review, and corporate knocking it down, that's just wrong. If a supervisor feels that an employee deserves a superior review, it should stay that way, not be modified by someone in another location who has no clue how the employee performs.

And if an employee isn't performing up to the level that they should be, there should be things in place to help that employee improve. I agree with Wagegoth in that sometimes they don't help you, but simply point out your shortcomings. Reviews should be a tool to not only evaluate how an employee is performing, but also help them to improve or grow in their job, and ulitmately, their career.

[powerboy]

Every review that I ever had, was a joke. It was always with some jackass, that didn't know me. Why didn't they have the managers in that place, give it, instead of the higher ups. I once got the best review, but I didn't get a raise, but everyone else did. That was when I was working at Walmart