Saturday, October 14, 2006

Reviews

I spent most of Friday and a little of Thursday working on my year-end review. My organization's year ends now but over the next year the year-end will shift to the spring to be the same as everyone in the larger corporations.

Reviews at Laws R Us are, IMHO, something that should be restricted by the Geneva convention.

First we have to write about the Goals we set for the year. It's pretty easy to write a paragraph that says, Yeah, I did that. (Yata! for Japanese pop fans.)

That's the easy part. Next you have to evaluate yourself against the eight or nine Key Success Factors. KSFs are about HOW you do your job. For example, how do you communicate, solve problems, etc. That's not all. There are six or seven qualities for each KSF that are different for each job level so there's really thirty to forty parts to the KSFs. Apparently other companies use KSFs but Laws emphasizes them in the review process over the Goals.

That means it's really important for a good review to write a lot of sharp stuff about how you satisfied the KSFs. Luckily a good review only has to include writeups on three qualities for each KSF but that's still 24 paragraphs that include a strong example. It's a lot of work.

My manager kept telling me "Don't overthink it! It's easy!" Right. I had to keep going back to his office to ask him about jargon in the KSFs that I still didn't understand. Every time he'd give me that "you're making it too hard" look.

It took most of a day to write the KSFs but I finished and I think it's okay. Unfortunately I still wasn't done.

We do 360 degree reviews, where a small number of people are asked to review you based on your Goals and....the KSFs. I gave my manager a list of people to review me (most of whom I'm confident will say good things) and I received requests to review a dozen people. Some of the reviews I had to do were easy but I realy struggled with some of them, not sure what things to comment on and how important my feedback will be.

Next I wait for my manager to write up his review of me and collect the other comments. He's going to go right to the deadline so it won't be for a few weeks. Then I can get my first raise and, amazingly, retroactive pay all the way back to when I started. That's more than fair.

The other downside to all of this is the less than optimal software we have to use. It's a product of some other division of the company so we're stuck with it. One of the first things you have to learn is how to go around it's limitations.

Is this a better process than others I've gone through at places like Widgets (no reviews or overtemplated ones) or Not Big Blue (manager reading my self review back to me)? I think there's too much writing but the measures are fair.

I think doing reviews is really important since they are the official statement of how you're doing but day-to-day honest communication and feedback has to be there too. My current job is the best I've had as far as communications goes. As they say in the HR manuals, the comments you hear in a review should not be a surprise.

I'm not expecting any surprises.

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