Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

It&#x27;s all honestly completely useless. I&#x27;ve never had a useful performance review at any company ever. It&#x27;s either I&#x27;m doing bad, and know it, and that is either my fault or due to reasons outside of my control. Or I&#x27;m doing well, and know it. Honestly, sometimes at places things were so bad that I felt I was doing terrible, but I was actually keeping the team going by pushing past a lot of tricky issues.<p>Really I think any company that waits until performance review time is really broken. That could be a year, or sometimes many years.<p>Also, the usefulness or performance management is usually undermined by the fact that the people doing the worst usually are in hardcore denial as to their performance. Those people are the hardest to change and manage. I&#x27;ve rarely seen performance management actually fix a problem, other than making the environment so unpalatable that the person just leaves.<p>I really wish I could have all that time wasted on writing useless &quot;self-reviews&quot; back. Even if I was staring at a blank wall it&#x27;d be time better spent.

Slightly off center from your question, but:<p>1. Every Wednesday I Google Meet with my salespeople. We review the prior week&#x27;s priority prospects, this week&#x27;s, and then I ask them about clients not on the list that our BI system has identified as promising. An integration of internal systems, Slack &amp; Zapier alerts me each day to anomalies (good and bad) with clients, inventory and systems. MixMax (shout out to Brad!) is a big help in tracking email activity. RingCentral reporting is a big help in validating Salesperson activity.<p>2. Every Friday I review Github repository activity for my development teams. A very soft-touch and collaborative conversation follows for developers and engineers whose pace of work or direction seems off. This is almost always a result of improper scoping, unrealistic milestones, or miscommunication.<p>3. Every Monday and Tuesday I&#x27;m hands-on with my marketing team preparing for the Wednesday release of our marketing communications, and reviewing ongoing advertising campaign results.<p>4. Every weekday I&#x27;m in our Xero accounting software looking at cash flow projections, inventory, A&#x2F;P and A&#x2F;R. Xero is hot garbage IMHO, but I&#x27;ve built some integrations that make is easier to use for real-time reporting.<p>5. I visit our satellite facility every other week for in-person chats with that team.<p>6. I&#x27;ve invested a lot in automation to track our market, predict conditions and generate alerts.<p>Notwithstanding 1-6 above, there&#x27;s no substitute for good market conditions and good employees. I have the latter, but not the former. I mention this just in-case you&#x27;re thinking you can systematize your way out of a demand vacuum.

It looks like a total waste of time.<p>As a developer of internal web apps, it is apparent what I must do next to serve my users, in the next week, month, quarter, year --- I have a long to-do list! It is also apparent what I must do to serve my team, in the next week, month, quarter, year. (I get rave reviews from both, unsolicited.)<p>The goals that cascade from the executives are laughably vague and obvious: cut costs, increase revenue, reduce maintenance, get to the root of recurring problems, please the customer (of course they phrase those things with your typical multisyllabic jargon). So what the process ends up being is taking my goals that I have already got and writing them down in another place (a shockingly flimsy and probably expensive web application they bought from a vendor) using certain words that they like. It is a total waste of money and time (which, ironically, is counter to at least two of their supreme goals).<p>Let me be clear. While it is theoretically possible that the executives know of a problem or need at the company that I don&#x27;t, and when they share their company-wide goals it would be news to me, this has never happened. There has never been a time when the yearly goals come out and I say, &quot;Oh, well, now that you put it that way . . . &quot;<p>On the other hand, I must be above average, because there exist many at my company who, left to themselves, would sit around and do nothing, or worse. Presumably this whole ceremony is in reaction to their behavior. In my opinion, such people should be fired, not babysat.

In most companies I&#x27;ve worked in: thinly veiled nepotism and cronyism. I&#x27;ve never seen the inputs of a performance management tool being the only inputs for calculating merit or bonus amounts, so the outcomes of both these situations depends heavily on your relationship with your boss and their boss.<p>Don&#x27;t get me started on stack ranking or making sure everyone &quot;fits the curve&quot; by knocking down everyone to average because HR said so.

We are a company of about 4000, our performance management is pretty shite. We essentially function as a company of middle managers with a software engineering department tacked on.<p>Getting promoted has very little to do with the role profiles of the above grade but instead involves doing some menial task, for example I knew a guy who was a total manchild and would smash the keyboard, groan and hide in the toilet if he encountered some difficult code, he would also never ask for help but because he did support he got promoted.<p>Also there&#x27;s a limited number of slots, so you could meet the criteria of the above grade go through the process and still not get promoted. We basically lose all our developers after 2-3 years and most projects are composed of contractors. people who can&#x27;t leave before 2 years and mediocre developers who are promoted way beyond their means and aren&#x27;t good enough to work at other companies.<p>The worst thing is our clients usually have a high opinion of us so our competitors must be even worst.

I&#x27;ve never worked anywhere that OKRs are actually taken seriously or followed through.<p>They&#x27;ll get rolled out with a big hype, people will fill them out with varying degrees of diligence and understanding of how OKRs are supposed to work.<p>3 months later they&#x27;re already forgotten and out of date. Some managers will try to keep it going for their teams, because that&#x27;s what they were told to do, but that&#x27;ll peter out once they realise no-one else in the org is taking it seriously.<p>6 - 12 months later there&#x27;ll be a half-hearted attempt to reset and resurrect the OKR process, but after the first time people take it even less seriously the second time around, and after a few more months OKRs are never mentioned again.

I&#x27;m eight years into management across two different sized companies. Both have ultimately had entirely subjective systems.<p>I&#x27;m currently a director of a twenty person office. My current teams are supposed to have stack ranked individuals, so I simply give everyone the exact average. I also give everyone the same objectives: improve performance with technical debt repayment, use retros to determine working agreements and adhere to them, adhere to a WIP limit and then help any other team areas when there are bottlenecks, do weekly research to keep your skills sharp, self organize your team to best meet the business goals, help anyone with their job when asked or offer a time when you next are free, and if you have no work ask your team for something to do. These are pretty easy to meet, so people usually do well on them.<p>Ultimately compensation is tied to the whole product, not the employee, since we all split any money evenly.<p>I find this works exceptionally well at ensuring the ultimate goal is team performance, not individual performance.<p>Team members not pulling their weight are identified and asked to find a new job or improve. The ones that don&#x27;t are given low ratings and let go.<p>In all it allows us to have a very stable team of high performers. Our average tenure is over seven years. No one has any incentive at all to &quot;beat&quot; everyone else. I&#x27;ve found the teams that employ such tactics never have long lasting talent anyway, just a string of &quot;heroes&quot; who burn out after a few years.<p>Also I flush this out with a regular &quot;salary review&quot; where I try to ensure everyone is paid fair market rate for their job. This happens maybe every 18 months or so for new grads, and less frequently as people get closer to salary ceilings for our location.

HR people in the UK use &#x27;performance management&#x27; as a euphemism for a kind of legal constructive dismissal.<p>1) Their attitude stinks but nothing specific that can be picked up in a disciplinary on its own<p>2) They have been in the job for a few years, and their old manager never recorded the behaviour problems<p>3) Their role is not redundant<p>So to get them out you meet regularly, set short term goals, and be really picky about not meeting them. The whole thing is designed to make the staff miserable so they leave or get sacked for missing the goals, whilst building up a substantial volume of paperwork supporting a legal defence at tribunal.<p>Or less cynically it allows the staff to understand what is expected of them, so they perform better. This never works IMHO

First company: My manager met with me once over two years. It was 18 months into my just over two years stay, and all she told me was &quot;We don&#x27;t know eachother at all so I can&#x27;t really judge your performance.&quot; She gave me the standard 7% and we never spoke again.<p>Second company: It was a huge joke. The CTO invented KPIs that were unattainable and didn&#x27;t matter, and we were given raises purely because our contract was profitable.<p>Third company: We had such a ridiculous process of &quot;Write three goals and go over them with your manager&quot;, which turned into &quot;Just write anything so HR doesn&#x27;t complain.&quot; The goals were totally useless. Engineers did not have the ability to decide what they worked on or how it went, but the goals implied they did. It was awful and, luckily, did not effect bonus targets.<p>I honestly think that &quot;performance management&quot; at most companies is a huge joke. I haven&#x27;t seen it, and none of my peers have seen it, run successfully or be taken seriously. Companies want to pretend they care about your career trajectory and goals only until an employees goals require any legitimate effort from the company&#x27;s side. The goals&#x2F;KPIs are pretty much only successful if an employee sets those goals to be &quot;Do whatever their manager thinks they should do&quot;, which I would argue isn&#x27;t a goal at all.

I work for a company that makes performance management and recognition and rewards software. As such, it is deeply embedded in our culture. We have a mix of tools that enable goals&#x2F;OKRs, 1:1s, feedback, structured performance reviews, and 9-box evaluations. I lead product design for the company, and part of the reason I took the job was being able to deep dive into the user experience of how this works, and ultimately improve my own management skills. The process of rebuilding, testing, and developing the tools has exposed me to some top brass HR folks at large companies. It has been awesome being able to get the perspective on what works for individuals, and what outcomes people are expecting at the company level. I really feel like I have grown significantly as a manager in my time here.<p>At our company Goals&#x2F;OKRs are set at the individual, department, and company level. You can align your goals up, or set individual (personal growth) goals. These can&#x2F;should be reviewed in your weekly 1:1s with your manager. We allow anyone to send recognition, or send or request feedback at any point. We have several templates that facilitate different feedback types. We do quarterly Check-Ins which is more of a top down performance review where you can reflect on goal progress, feedback, and next steps with your manager. The 9-box talent assessment is calibrated for each employee twice a year. We also facilitate surveys at the company level to help do things like eNPS scores. If you want to learn more, ask away or check us out at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kazoohr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kazoohr.com&#x2F;</a>

(Disclaimer: I work at Amazon, but don&#x27;t speak on behalf of the company. Just sharing some bits about my experience, this is just my experience and doesn&#x27;t reflect official Policy.)<p>Prior to working at Amazon, I had mostly worked for start-ups. The thing I found at startup is that people are trying to figure out processes, and it&#x27;s kind of hard. Most people putting in a process (whether that&#x27;s HR or the founding team) are trying to do their best, but start-ups aren&#x27;t at a large enough scale where they really need to have scalable processes, and for individual contributors all the distinctions are pretty informal anyway, so there&#x27;s usually no individual contributor promotion path.<p>At Amazon, I was fortunate to work under someone who had been my boss previously, and we had a good working relationship. He was not afraid to give me blunt, useful feedback about either my work or how my work was perceived.<p>At some of the start-ups I worked with, part of the year-end evaluation involved filling out a form with a lot of evaluation criteria - the employee would fill out a self-eval form, and the manager would fill out a form, and then they would compare during the evaluation meeting. There&#x27;s no such equivalent at Amazon.<p>One thing that overall I like about Amazon&#x27;s performance management in terms of promotions is how it&#x27;s centered around a document that you and your manager write together. There are some tedious aspects to the process, but if nothing else when you go up for promotion you know what your manager is officially telling other people are your strengths and weaknesses. The flip side of the process is that decisions about your promotion are being made based sometimes on the quality of your promo doc. I&#x27;m not sure about all the company, but at least in the team I was on some of the senior folks set aside time for reviewing promo docs that they were working on with other members of the team to iron out any &quot;doc writing&quot; issues.<p>We don&#x27;t really have an official OKR system, but as a more senior engineer my personal goal has generally been to enable whatever my team&#x27;s goal is for the quarter or year (launch this product; get this architecture document done; research how to solve this problem).<p>Besides the official process, I&#x27;ve also found it useful to ask trusted peers how I&#x27;m doing, whether I&#x27;m giving them everything they need and expect of me. It&#x27;s also pretty common to have one or more mentors outside of your team to give you more informal feedback.

Performance management is subjectivity masquerading as objectivity.<p>I&#x27;m a broken record about this.

What size is your company&#x2F;team?<p>Different strategies perform well depending on size. For example, most of the time I find OKRs a little excessive for a small team.<p>Have you identified KPIs? What are they?<p>&quot;What&#x27;s measured is managed,&quot; said Drucker. Personally, finding what exactly to measure is difficult. So don&#x27;t be afraid to spend a lot of time figuring this out. When you do, all the other performance management strategies will somehow find a way to work towards your goals.

I’m a big fan of Dr. Deming’s suggestions in this realm (for those not familiar he was involved with helping the auto industry in Japan post WWII among other things). Basically we focus too much on the who and not the what. The manager creates the system to which the worker is involved in, then you judge the employee on your system. So performance reviews are just ways to blame. Instead power needs to be placed in the hands of the employee. They are closest to the problem and the manager is supposed to empower them and basically remove impediments. I’d have to go back to the books but I recall him saying a three tier system but really aimed at seeing what employees need help and those excelling that need to help distribute their expertise to help the processes and continual improvement.

At my previous company we had to pick goals that aligned with the goals of our role&#x2F;level and the goals of the company. It was a shit show. Our partner in charge would reject goals until everyone was struck with goals that were very far putside everyones comfort zone. Everyone hated it.<p>As senior dev &#x2F; senior consultant I had to pick goals like „prepare a pitch for a potential customer“, stretch goal „win a pitch“. I didn‘t want to do this. I don‘t care about sales. I want to design and develop systems for someone who wants me to do that, not convince someone to let me do it.<p>By now almost everyone quit.<p>Current company: I can work in peace. Bi-weekly 1:1 with my manager that is usually over rather quickly.

I&#x27;ve never worked anywhere where the annual review wasn&#x27;t an almost entirely fictional process. It&#x27;s totally subjective finger-in-the-air stuff. Often to my benefit, but I recognise that it&#x27;s subjective.

From a task-oriented perspective, developer A can seem more productive than developer B because developer A marked more tasks as finished than developer B.<p>The problem is that marking a task as finished does not mean that its deliverable is solid. A developer can game the system by leaving technical debt behind for others to fix. In this way, the developer is stealing productivity from others, by forcing them to spend more time reading, debugging, refactoring their half-baked code.<p>A neophyte manager may buy into this approach to performance, and even encourage it. But after a few iterations of this unsustainable practice of leaving tech-debt behind for no reason, reality sets in: now you need an army of engineers to get things done because the system becomes fragile and complicated. And you also need an endless amount of documentation that is constantly getting out of sync.<p>In a way, under poor performance management rules, development becomes like a game of pool: it&#x27;s not only about having a higher score, but also about making it more difficult for others to have a high score. If you want high productivity, recognize this and penalize it.

Generally, it&#x27;s a dumpster fire.<p>In any rational world, execs would be basing their OKRs on something similar to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;atlas&#x2F;guides&#x2F;business-of-saas#the-fundamental-equation-of-saas" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;atlas&#x2F;guides&#x2F;business-of-saas#the-fundame...</a>. Instead it&#x27;s a trickle up process whereby people tell execs what they want to work on, then the execs group those into OKRs. Also the OKRs appear to only have one level, despite being an org with a thousand people. And finally, the system uses the internal wiki to track, rather than integrating with the project&#x2F;issue backlog tool.<p>Annual reviews are even worse. People fish for peer reviews that paint the rosiest picture. They only happen once a year and if something bad is going to happen to you, I recommend it happen directly after reviews, and absolutely never right before them, the recency bias is huge.

We are a team of ~50 software engineers and about the same amount of non-engineering staff. We have a quarterly performance review. It starts from setting goals at the beginning of the quarter. Then we have a home-brewed CRM-like system to enter accomplishments, nominate peers, giving reviews and feedback and finally grading.<p>Then managers talking to their reports, discussing results, giving and receiving feedback.<p>Grades are from 2 to 5, greater is better. Normal grade is 4, it gives a bonus of 1&#x2F;2 of monthly salary. 5 is 1 monthly salary and 3 is 1&#x2F;4 of monthly salary. Our compensations are on market, so we ended up better compensated even after grade &quot;3&quot;.<p>Two 5&#x27;s in a row is an occasion to talk about promotion. Two 3&#x27;s is a reason to talk about leaving the company.<p>That&#x27;s about it, the whole process takes about two weeks, most of the time in a grade calibration process.

I worked for a big enterprise type company. Our performance management process was predictably broken like most BigCorp companies processes are. We had cascading goals from the CEO down to the team manger level, with numerous layers in between. These goals were not data driven in any way. Our performance process was heavily biased towards the quarter prior to the annual review -- so don&#x27;t put any points on the board until the 4th quarter, that&#x27;s when they&#x27;ll count for the most. Common saying -- wins cover up sins.<p>As a manager of a team, I tried to institute OKR&#x27;s into the process for my team at minimum. I found that technique partially successful -- meaning successful for me and my team but limited in that other teams in my department wouldn&#x27;t adopt them. Too much work they said.

I work for a large company. There are four ratings you can be assigned - &#x27;not doing your job&#x27;, &#x27;need more improvement&#x27;, &#x27;you&#x27;re doing your job average to well&#x27;, and &#x27;exceptional&#x27; for about 8% of people.<p>I can&#x27;t really tell you how it&#x27;s measured or anything like that. The company has policies about it, but more often than not those policies are blatantly violated. It basically comes down to the subjective opinions of your manager, the department head, and the business people you interact with.

Thankfully, there is none. What a blessing.

Last company I worked with used OKRs, but in their own &quot;unique&quot; way. Senior management was always 3-4 weeks late with the company wide OKRs, so the OKRs for individual teams would either be wildly divergent from the approved company direction or they were switched mid-quarter to align with the company OKRs.<p>Nobody ever checked the progress of the OKRs either, not even at the end of the measuring period and not even to calibrate the realism of the goals for the next measuring period. Once, when asked at an all hands meeting by the person who had been designated &quot;OKR champion&quot; a year earlier, the CEO answered he had forgotten about it but that OKRs were certainly still on.<p>I think the most success was had by a single guy who had managed to get &quot;increase twitter followers&quot; on his personal OKR list. Not for some company account btw, for his personal twitter account. It was continuous hilarity, but I don&#x27;t regret not working there anymore. Whatever system you use, take it seriously.

Frankly, our personal performance goals are just copied straight from the department goals. Any attempt to make them a little sensible is met with a ‘just do what everyone else does’.<p>That said, when performance review time comes around, that also means that it doesn’t really mean anything. The important thing is how your manager feels about you, and the rest is a formality.

It was pretty standard (at least on paper) in my last company (a top 10 bank in terms of total assets).<p>1. Agree OKRs with managers in the beginning of the year (to be completed by March). Everyone at same level&#x2F;hierarchy will have same baseline.<p>2. Performance evaluation in October. Employees discuss their achievements with managers.<p>3. Results disclosed in February.<p>This waterfall-ish process never really worked:<p>1. Over the year priorities change, teams evolve, and products take new directions. So, everyone used to put vague OKRs.<p>2. Evaluation process is a black box. Performance metrics (if there really were any) were never disclosed, and were calibrated at multiple levels.<p>3. You get to know only your evaluation. No data to compare to whatsoever.<p>I&#x27;ve seen this doing damage only. People with good visibility, and network used to get better ratings despite average work. Silent hard-workers will get average ratings, and will leave.

I manage 30 people, but I review only 10 of them and the rest are reviewed by my team-leads.<p>We use KPIs and 360 feedback. These are not perfect measures, and I acknowledge that often, but are good enough for some purposes.<p>Performance reviews are easy for all sides if there is nothing new in them. If you either side is surprised during a performance review they are not talk to each other nearly enough during the reviewed period.<p>If I had the opportunity to evaluate I would experiment with more frequent feedback - like monthly sessions, small forms focusing on a very few key items.

I am in the quest of a system myself. I have tried various systems and asked other companies (big and small) on theirs. My tech startup was around 25-30 employees over 5 years. We have tried Balanced Scorecards&#x2F;OKRs linked systems, 360 Evaluations, etc and ended up making a mix.<p>We used Google Sheets and asked for qualitative feedback on defined headers (skill with KPIs &amp; culture&#x2F;values), and a rating (1-5). Each of the headers had weightage that changed with roles &amp; levels.<p>We tried to make promotions and compensation changes as data driven as possible, but they were inline with intuition &#x2F; general opinion. To the employee it always felt like &quot;Why did we do all this for such little change?!&quot; It sucks but you need to improve the system across many years. With every round try and understand signal vs noise. That&#x27;s how you build trust.<p>Consistency is key. A few learnings regardless of the system that I learnt the hard way:<p>* Communication. You need to communicate before, during and after the process. You need to make it relatable for all levels of employees. Give them specific templates with specific examples. You need to remove the narrative of you-vs-them, doing-this-to-justify-an-increase, and bring focus on reflection.<p>* Frequency&#x2F;Cycle. &quot;if it hurts, do it more often&quot; is the quote that applies to this. Never let it slide. Minimum every six months, ideally every quarter.<p>* Review of KPIs. You need to review the KPIs every week without fail. It forces you to focus on metrics that you can move on a week-on-week basis. Anything that changes in step function over a month&#x2F;quarter&#x2F;year can be broken into a smaller metric.<p>* Rewards and Recognitions. We were always late on this. Always rolling out the red carpet when someone threatened to quit. It always felt like extortion as the manager. Don&#x27;t wait for the cycle to call out extreme performance (great and terrible). Give negative feedback in private as quickly as possible. Do a non-monetary (Amazon Gift Coupons etc) for great performance. Wait for promotions and compensation.<p>* Pay performance linked pay well. I think this was what I got wrong the most. I did not plan the company finances well enough to pay out immediately. I would say &quot;Hey great performance! We will pay you $$ but in 2-3 months when our situation improves&quot;. That erodes trust in a moment.<p>* Getting and acting on feedback. I struggled on this one too and made many excuses -- we are going through a curve<p>Hope this helps. I would love to hear from others.

I’ve used pseudo-OKRs at the last few places, where there’s basically a bailout option where you just change the OKRs at the end of the year to match what happened (if you were doing well). Depends on what you mean by works&#x2F;doesn’t work. In my experience performance management is mostly about recording business justification for continued employment, bonuses, advancement, or the negative versions of these. So by that metric these systems definitely work.

You fill in a bunch of forms during the year, at the end they tell you you&#x27;ve placed in the highest tier, and as a reward you get a 3.5% pay increase instead of 3.0%.

I&#x27;m actually defining this process for the first time in my current company. I&#x27;ll explain my philosophy behind performance levels and goals. I&#x27;d love any feedback. I&#x27;m specifically trying to make this an actionable process.<p>First, the levels, because I perhaps have a different interpretation of these than I&#x27;m used to seeing. There are essentially three levels that correspond to performance compared to expectations. So underperforming, performing, and overperforming. Only underperforming carries a negative connotation [0], because it means that you are not meeting the expectations for your level. In contrast, overperforming means that you are reaching beyond your current level.<p>So, hopefully we have zero people underperforming. Also, hopefully we have the vast majority of people performing. Because overperforming basically means we need to be finding an expanded role for that person, which we may or may not have. If too many people are overperforming, then we can maybe expect turf wars as people start trying to expand their role without guidance, which is terrible for morale. Hopefully we can balance overperformers with growth, so we are moving people to expanded roles and then filling in below with new hires.<p>So, given this leveling, there are two types of goals: baseline and growth. Baseline goals apply to the entire team and define those baseline expectations for that team. Meeting these goals will keep the team out of underperforming territory [1]. Growth goals are tailored to a specific individual, and detail specific targets to work on. The idea is to provide meaningful growth to the person and their capabilities, with an eye towards expanding their role. Over time, having and meeting these growth goals will result in overperforming as the individual fills that expanded role more and more.<p>[0] Caveat: I would expect a junior-level to be growing. So juniors who are not overperforming are worrisome.<p>[1] There&#x27;s a bit of issue here in team vs individuals. Generally, as long as the team is successful, I tend to err on the side of overrating individuals. After all, part of the reason we make teams is to allow them to shore up weaknesses and play to strengths. However, I leave in an out by having a baseline goal centered on teamwork and team success. So if someone is not contributing as expected to the team, there&#x27;s something to call them out on.

I&#x27;m surprised at the references to OKRs as a part of performance reviews. Yes, OKRs have elements of focusing and measuring progress, but they are also about encouraging people to be ambitious and communicating intent.<p>It&#x27;s generally accepted that using them for performance reviews is a bad thing because it encourages people to be conservative and create hackable key results.

My experience: Most of the time, all it takes , is to beat the system..<p>In one of the companies I worked for : one hand we were doing marvels in automating stuff and repetitive work which saves ton of manual efforts and reduces human errors , and guess what ! its not even accounted for in the standard goals..<p>Sometimes you need to stare at the bullshit and say here we go and beat the crap out of it..

Tangent: Are there any good books or articles on how to find the answer to this question within your own company as applied to yourself?

I&#x27;m currently working on solving this (still in the early stages). More specifically I&#x27;m working to objectively measure performance over time, with a strong focus on actionable insights to help you improve. If you would like to test this email adaobi@mesure.app. Or you can just email me your problems and i&#x27;ll see if I can solve them.

To my knowledge there is no performance management as such (at least in my subsidiary). We have a mandatory quarterly review, but it&#x27;s intent seems to be to maintain the manager-employee relationship to at least a bare minimum, and to offer a platform to collect data if someone is really, really not pulling their weight.

At my previous company, performance management was a show they put on to get a story to tell when it was time to discuss compensation. Lack of performance resulted in firing without warning. Performance assessment gave information about their reading of the job market and the risk you&#x27;d jump ship.

Just to clarify: what kind of goals do you mean? Is the context people management or anything in general?

Shameless plug about goal setting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ochronus.online&#x2F;goal-setting&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ochronus.online&#x2F;goal-setting&#x2F;</a>

Everyone got a 3 rating every quarter. Pointless.

Survival of the fittest: after being at the lowest 10% for three of five years, you get washed out

We used Google Sheets. Honestly, it appeared that culture was more important than tooling here.

It has been known for nearly 100 years that you can never criticize your staff.<p>“I will speak ill of no man and speak all the good I know of everybody.”<p>― Benjamin Franklin<p>Last job, my last performance review. There was literally only 1 complaint against me. I was late &gt;40 times. My boss told me he was disappointed in me. I was upset because I was never ever late to work; I was always early.<p>I asked him to tell me when I was late. He pulled it up. Everytime I worked the weekend because I was oncall 24x7; I would swipe in and because I swipped in after 8am or whatever it was considered a late.<p>So not only was I going above and beyond helping people afterhours, I was taking a hit in my performance review because of it. Dont care how stoic you are, that hurts.