Goldman Sachs Introduces Real-Time Employee Performance Reviews
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
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.
"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.
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...
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...
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?
...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.
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.
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.
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.