The inimitable Rowan Manahan once again got me invited on to a live radio show in Dublin, this time to talk about networking and how it can make you happy. And rich. But mostly happy.
We had a great chat on the air and you can hear the whole thing here – it’s about 10 minutes long.
In the next 90 minutes we will:
And of course, we will both pretend that the results of this little chat will not in any way influence the salary adjustments coming up in two months.
Now… any questions?
It seems that no one likes performance reviews. Joel Spolsky, the CEO of Fog Creek Software certainly doesn’t:
At two of the companies I’ve worked for, the most stressful time of year was the twice-yearly performance review period.
For some reason, the Juno HR department and the Microsoft HR department must have copied their performance review system out of the same Dilbertesque management book, because both programs worked exactly the same way.
First, you gave “anonymous” upward reviews for your direct manager (as if that could be done in an honest way). Then, you filled out optional “self-evaluation” forms, which your manager “took into account” in preparing your performance review.
Finally, you got a numerical score, in lots of non-scalar categories like “works well with others”, from 1-5, where the only possible scores were actually 3 or 4.
Managers submitted bonus recommendations upwards, which were completely ignored and everybody received bonuses that were almost completely random.
The system never took into account the fact that people have different and unique talents, all of which are needed for a team to work well.
(source)
Almost every medium-sized or large company does performance reviews. Everybody does it – and I think it’s time to stop!
Performance reviews are fundamentally broken. Managers hate them and fear them and resent the drain on their time.
Employees often leave reviews demotivated, cynical and with no clear idea of how well they’re doing and how to improve:
Research into British workers found a quarter of respondents thought managers simply regarded the reviews as a “tick-box” exercise, while one in five accused their bosses of not even thinking about the appraisal until they were in the room.
Almost half (44 per cent) did not think their boss was honest during the process, 29 per cent thought they were pointless, and a fifth felt they had had an unfair appraisal, according to the YouGov poll of 3000 workers.
Only a fifth believed their manager would always act on what came up during the review and 20 per cent said their boss never bothered to follow up any concerns raised.
(source)
There is a lot of advice out there on how to fix performance reviews but in my opinion, performance reviews would still be worse than uselss, even if we could fix everything that is currently wrong about them and the very fact that companies fell the need to have them, shows that something is seriously broken in our workplaces.
Here’s why performance reviews and appraisals are such a waste of time and why our workplaces would be better off without them.
Managers actually cite performance appraisals or annual reviews as one of their most disliked tasks (source) and as we saw above, employees dislike and distrust the process too.
Performance reviews are supposed to be about giving people feedback on their past performance and setting goals for the future. This is impossible in a format that people dislike this intensely.
Studies show that if you’re in a bad mood (and lots of people are during their review meetings), you’re not open to criticism and suggestions. You’re also almost certainly not in the mood to make big plans for your future growth and development
Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins in their 2000 book called “Abolishing Performance Appraisals: Why They Backfire and What to Do Instead” argue that employee reviews take on too many tasks at once. They’re about communications, feedback, coaching, promotion, compensation and legal documentation. Good luck doing all of that in an hour or two!
“Yeah, I know that Johnson in accounting is lagging a little and seems dissatisfied, but his performance review is coming up in 4 months – we’ll handle it then.”
No. No, no, no!
In fact, If you have good, open, honest communication between managers and employees, if people constantly know what they do well end where they can improve then you have no need for a formal review process.
Many companies have noticed that formal reviews are not working and the response, overwhelmingly, has been to formalize them more. There are now more questionnaires to fill out before, during and after for both employees and managers. More boxes to tick. More ratings on a 1-5 scale More time spent preparing.
But here’s the thing: This actually detracts from the value of the conversation you will have. The more you structure the conversation, the less likelihood that you will actually get to talk about what’s important.
The more boxes to tick, the more likely it is that it will get treated as an exercise in “filling in the blanks.”
Joel Spolsky has another good example:
…one friend of mine was a cheerful catalyst, a bouncy cruise director who motivated everyone else when the going got tough. He was the glue that held his team together. But he tended to get negative reviews, because his manager didn’t understand his contribution.
Many of the most valuable and important things we contribute to the workplace do not fit into those little check boxes. If a manager doesn’t understand this during the year, he will most certainly not get it in the performance review.
A lot of companies have noticed that performance reviews go even worse when they also double as negotiations about salaries and promotions.
Consequently they have separated these two processes and will first have appraisals and then later on salary negotiations.
Riiiiiight. Does anyone expect this to work? Will managers forget everything they said in the appraisal when setting salaries later on? Will employees fall for this and be more honest, rather than try to make themselves look good?
Of course not. But trying to pretend that’s the way it works just adds another layer of deception to the whole sorry mess.
Managers can hold back from offering negative feedback because they fear conflict.
Employees often don’t offer honest criticism of managers and workplaces out of a fear of offending and the knowledge that, regardless of formal policies, the content of this talk will affect your salary.
In short, everyone is on the defensive from the beginning.
Everybody’s busy these days, and on top of your regular tasks, once a year you have to find time to prepare for, execute and follow up on the performance reviews. To make matters worse, very few companies factor in this time in peoples’ schedules and give them a lighter workload during those weeks.
This means that rather than doing it right, many people focus on doing it fast and just getting it over with, making the whole process worse than useless.
If you’re not capable of giving your employees regular, specific, timely and relevant feedback (good and bad) – you should not be a manager at all.
And formal performance reviews are not the solution! The managers who actually do manage to give worthwhile performance reviews are invariably also those who don’t need to have them because they already excel at providing regular, constructive feedback.
A 2006 Harvard Business Review article talks about how to fix employee reviews by doing things like:
But I think the solution is a lot simpler: lose’em. Stop having formal employee reviews, whether annual, semi-annual or quarterly. They’re not only a waste of time, they’re actively harmful to motivation and happiness at work.
As Peter Block says in the foreword to the Abolishing Performance Appraisals book mentioned above:
“If the appraisal process is so useful, we should consider using it in our personal lives. Would we say to our spouse, significant other or intimate friend, ‘Dear, it is time for your annual performance appraisal. For the sake of our relationship and the well-being of the family unit, I want you to prepare for a discussion of your strengths and weaknesses and the ways you have fallen short of your goals for the year.
” ‘Also, honey, I would like for you to define some stretch goals for the coming year.’
(source)
Good luck with that :o)
What do you think? Do you know of companies that have abolished performance reviews? Do you know of any that have them and do them well? What happened at your last performance review? Please write a comment, I’d really like to know.
I’m busy reviewing the Danish translation of my book. It’s a bit of a chore but the nice thing about it is that I get to read my own book in my native language for the first time – a nice if somewhat surreal experience.
I wrote the book in English in 2006 and it’s now been translated into Danish and will be published here in Denmark in April.
So now I need a Danish title for the book because the “Happy Hour” metaphor does not really fly in Danish.
Apparently, my brain lacks the particular area responsible for coming up with names for stuff, and you guys came through beautifully for me when I needed a title for my book in English, so please, let me hear any idea you may have!
I need a title and a subtitle for the book, and I’d like a title that grabs people’s attention and creates an immediate mental image or connection. Bob Sutton has a post on Sticky Book titles, including The 4-hour Workweek, Orbiting the Giant Hairball, Guns, Germs and Steel and of course his own excellent, excellent book The No Asshole Rule.
Those titles all do just that. So… any ideas for me?
Automattic (the people behind WordPress, Akismet and other cool projects) are looking for something they call a happiness engineer. What’s that all about?
Happiness Engineer
Our software and services are far from perfect, and when things go wrong people aren’t shy about contacting us asking for help.
We consider the support side of the user experience to be vitally important because it’s the person who interacts with our customers most and makes the biggest impression in their time of need. In fact everyone who joins Automattic, regardless of position, does support for 3 weeks.
The customers range from the everyday blogger to VIPs like CNN, Flickr, and People Magazine. The job requires:
- Patience and grace.
- Excellent writing skills.
- Working knowledge of WordPress, HTML, and CSS.
That’s fantastic. First of all because of the title – Happiness Engineer is a cool job title.
Secondly for the admission that “our software is far from perfect” and that “it’s the person who interacts with our customers most and makes the biggest impression in their time of need.” Excellent point!
Thirdly, I’m crazy about the fact that “everyone who joins Automattic, regardless of position, does support for 3 weeks.” That is a great way to clue people in to what the company is really about and what the customers really think about them.
And lastly, advertising for someone who has “patience and grace” is just nifty.
This ad makes Automattic look cool, it makes them look like a fun workplace and it makes me like them all in one fell swoop.
Pretty good for a job ad, huh?
(Thx to Thomas Bo Christensen for telling me about this ad).
You do not lead by hitting people over the head – that’s assault, not leadership.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
Today The CS Monitor published an op-ed piece I wrote called “Yes, you can be happy at work” which talks about the difference between American and Scandinavian attitudes.
A quote:
“You get paid to do your job, not to like it,” seems to be the attitude of most US managers and workplaces. What’s worse, American employees seem to be willing participants in this arrangement. When I ask Americans what makes them happy at work, they rarely talk about the work itself – many tend to see it as a means to an end, rather than as something to enjoy.
The result is that US workplaces are dominated by status-seeking career climbers, where the paycheck is the only motivator, where employee turnover is shockingly high, where bad management is never challenged, where burnout and cynicism are the order of the day, and only Dilbert comic strips provide relief.
Click here to read the whole thing.
It’s inspired by this earlier post about my experiences from a recent trip to America.
Before the paper would publish it, I had to agree to a few edits though. For instance this line didn’t make it into print:
In fact, recent studies have Denmark leading the lists of happy nations – so eat it, Sweden!
Though I kinda figured it wouldn’t :o)
I previously blogged about jiibe, a really cool site that lets you discover the corporate culture most likely to make you happy at work.
You answer a few questions (at least 14, but the more you answer, the more accurate your results) and the site can then tell you how well you match the culture in your current workplace and also make some suggestions for where you might fit in even better.
Give jiibe a whirl – their test is fun and simple and the results can be pretty revealing :o)
Full disclosure: While we may do some work together in the future, jiibe are not paying me to advertise for them – I just really, really like their concept :o)
And what is it to work with love?
Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
– Kahlil Gibran in The Profet
The Employee Factor blog has a great post about the Japanese word Karoshi:
“Death by overwork” or karoshi (Kah-roe-she) is killing the Japanese Manager in his prime. How? Marathon hours at work lead to heart failure and brain bleeds.
…
We’re talking a lot of overtime. Maybe 100 hours of overtime as estimated by an expert on karoshi.Take a moment to take that in.
Imagine death from overwork being so common in Japan, that there is actually a word for it. From the Wikipedia entry on Karoshi:
The first case of kar?shi was reported in 1969 with the death from a stroke of a 29-year-old male worker in the shipping department of Japan’s largest newspaper company.
It was not until the latter part of the 1980s, during the Bubble Economy, however, when several high-ranking business executives who were still in their prime years suddenly died without any previous sign of illness, that the media began picking up on what appeared to be a new phenomenon.
This new phenomenon was quickly labeled kar?shi and was immediately seen as a new and serious menace for people in the work force. In 1987, as public concern increased, the Japanese Ministry of Labour began to publish statistics on kar?shi.
As you may know I’m Danish, and I take pride in the fact that there is no word for Karoshi in Danish. Instead we have a very different word: arbejdsglæde. Arbejde means work, glæde means happiness so arbejdsglæde simply means happiness at work.
And in case you’re wondering how that little sucker of a tongue-twister is pronounced, you can hear me explain it a little more here:
The word arbejdsglæde and how to pronounce it. (2 Mb mp3 file, 2 minutes).
This word exists only in the Scandinavian languages (I’ve checked!) and this is not a coincidence. Nordic business culture has a decades-long tradition of focusing on the well-being of employees.
UPDATE: Apparently it exists in Dutch as well. Thank you to Virgil for pointing that out.
Vocabulary matters. It says something about Japanese vs. Scandinavian business cultures that we have arbejdsglæde and they have karoshi.
And I have absolutely no doubt which culture is more likely to make people happy and to create great workplaces.
Here is how I know someone is successful — If you are able to give from your abundance then you are successful.
– Fred Gratzon (source)
This is Fred Gratzon, author of the excellent book The Lazy Way to Success, in top form giving the best and shortest definition of success I’ve ever seen.
Having abundance is not enough – you are only truly successful when you can share your abundance. And if you only read one book on success, make it Fred’s – it seriously changed my thinking on work, and is one of my favorite books about happiness at work.
Fred’s thought reminded me of the ancient Greeks – they measured a person’s wealth not by how much he owned but by how much he gave away.
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