Mid Year Review

Amazingly I'm coming up on six months in my new job. Of course I'm still the new person and I'm constantly asking "dumb" questions that it seems like everyone knows the answer to. I'm comfortable wandering around the cruise ship headquarters now amongst thousands of people and a growing number of friends. I'm working harder than I have in years, prepping myself for my meetings and trying to actually understand things I would have glossed over in the past.

I happened to start at Laws R Us as my organization was finishing their yearly reviews (review periods are staggered across the company). A few weeks ago at my group's leadership meeting my manager said "Oh yeah, everybody has to do their mid-year review by the end of May." Everyone who had been there longer than me groaned and someone said (predictably) "Do we have to?" My manager just gave them "the stare" and together we devised a very minimal set of instructions to send out to everyone.

Reviews are based on how you reach your goals (e.g., did I produce a certain set of documents for each program) AND on the manner in which you reached your goals. Were you innovative? How well did you communicate? Did your work align with the company or the organization's goals? These quality of behavior measures are called Key Success Factors and I'm told a lot of companies use them in reviews.

So today I went into the not-very-good but internally created tool for recording goals and reviews and wrote some stuff. Talking to my peers I got the distinct impression that this mid-year thing was not a big deal and I should use it as practice for my end-of-year review which is a big deal and will affect my raise. (Imagine that Widgeteers, a review that affects your raise!)

I suppose my manager and I will talk through the four paragraphs during my next one-on-one. I predict he'll say it's fine and then we'll go off into some side discussion about glaciers or something unrelated. Things are going okay and I'm not sweating it this time.

Speaking of Widgets, congrats to my friends that got their ten year jacket! You deserve a lot more than a jacket for surviving there for that long. I heard the big Holiday party in May was quite the pep rally and included the members of the Board flown in to hear the rhapsodic praise of their wisdom in running the company. As a shareholder I object to spending money on those airfares. They should have flown the ten-year people to New York for the weekend!

Layoffs

No, not at my job. The layoffs were at Not Big Blue, the slowly expiring mainframe company I worked at during the '90s. The director at my new job gave me the news since she worked there at the same time I did and keeps in touch with people back there. The company did their usual pattern of doing a voluntary layoff then doing the big bang layoff. People were dumped all across the facility and part-timers were forced to full time.

I watched the corporation shrink from 120,000 to 42,000 people during the nine years I was at Not Big Blue as a contractor (four years) and captive employee (five years). Most of that happened when I was a contractor. They always kept us contractors and dumped the captives by the dozen. Every month a new section of the large building would empty out as whole groups were disbanded. After a while it was kind of creepy to walk through the darkened areas to the cafeteria.

Later, when I was a captive at Not Big Blue, I was much more part of the general anxiety when layoff rumors started. That's funny isn't it---when I could lose my job with a day's notice I was relaxed. Contractors expect that, it comes with the job. When I was a captive waiting for the layoff announcement I joined the rumor circles that dotted the cubicle city and worried.

The anxiety is pervasive. People worry about losing their job AND they worry about keeping their job and having a ton of additional work dumped on them to cover for everyone that is laid off. Younger employees worry about not having enough experience to get another job and the high seniority (mostly middle managers) worry about ever getting another job. Managers worry about being demoted to workers or being given one of the "difficult" groups to manage.

I left Not Big Blue at the end of a period of relative stability. We had a new CEO who was one hell of a PR and finance guy. He had hyped the stock price from $6 to almost $50 a share, had increased our benefits, and was heavily promoting new products and a services organization. I left about the time it was revealed that creative bookkeeping was responsible for the wonderful quarterly reports and the stock price fell from 48 to 9 in two quarters.

I think it was the beginning of the company's latest skid. Big Blue had wonderful technology and "resilient" software but they got stuck in the 60's and 70's. (Is that punctuation correct, daughter?) They never got a foothold in the Unix world and completely ignored the Internet. A large installed base is out there but it's not enough to support a large company. I fear the future is all about anxiety and layoffs.

Reorganization

In big companies there are a million reasons to reorganize. You reorganize if the CEO decides to change the mission of the company or a part of the company. You reorganize if you're not making enough money with the current org or if you're making a lot of money but you think you can make more. You reorg when you buy a company or product or you sell one. Etc., etc., etc.

Our reorg happened officially on Friday although I knew what was going to happen by mid-week. We reorged because my org hired another manager to handle the ever-increasing size of the department and it was a good time to rearrange everything since I think it had been a few years since the last reorg.

This reorg was done by moving around the various project areas and then moving the people that went with them---or something like that. My group wound up being pretty much dispersed except for the project managers like me. The idea is that we'll get more people in the group to staff our project areas as more people are hired.

We had our last group meeting today. People were not at all worried about the changes which was interesting. While all the managers in the group are very professional, there are definitely differences between them so some people are headed for a big cultural change.

At Not Big Blue I must have worked in three or four different organizational setups and survived numerous reorgs and a lot of layoffs (NOTE: Not Big Blue laid off people in my old area just last week--that's a topic for another day.) We always expected the worst from a reorg and often got it.

I care about reorgs because I do care who my manager is. I left Not Big Blue for Widgets to work for a tough, intelligent, brutally honest manager who created the perfect work environment for me. Then she left and I eventually wound up with...ugh,I don't want to think about it. I guess in the end it's like my current manager says, "You can't choose your manager."