October 2007

On Brett’s blog this week, he wrote about performance review time at work, and it cracked me up so much that I had to share it with some of my coworkers, all of whom feel his pain. Like Santa, the review fairy has ways to know whether you’ve been naughty or nice. One of the ways is called “The Self Review”. It sounds important but really all it is is a way to take your balls and put them in a vice and give you the opportunity to tighten the screws. See, I told you she was magnanimous. Three things can happen with self-reviews and like throwing a pass in the NFL, two of them are bad. Those two things are you’re honest and you tell your overlords about all the internet you surf at work which then results in you getting a bad review or you totally oversell yourself and the overlords figure that you’re a self-promoting prick with an agenda. In the end, it shouldn’t be my damn job to review myself. They are bloody well paying my boss to know what I do every day (trust me, he drops by enough that he should). The Self Review is a ridiculous piece of HR double-speak so that the Man can find new ways to screw you…. (click here to read the rest, it’s worth it) And I responded: We have to do something similar, except we rate ourselves on ten dimensions (called The Expectations) – things like “Manages Conflict Effectively”, “Handles Problem-Solving Wisely,” and “Builds Trust,” and write paragraphs on how we’ve performed up to scratch. We are required to utilize ridiculous patronizing language (called The Rating Levels) to do it too. For instance, instead of Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, we have to say Excelling, Learning, Doing, Absent. […]