It's that time again!

I am talking about The Annual Performance Review at work. Today C.O.B. is the deadline and I still have not even started on it. My husband and I have the same attitude when it comes to this Performance Review thing, even though we have been through this so many times. Some people are good at exaggerating what they have done in terms of the efforts required and the overall outcome. They can write non-stop, repeatedly on the same small task making it sounds like it has a great impact to the rest of the company. For us, we just do our best job in line with our business goals delivering everything on time as expected, nothing to be advertised. So the performance review for some will be a 25 pages long publication versus a reasonable 6 to 8 pages long summary report. If you happened to have a good manager who knows exactly what you did the past year, then you are in good hands for he can discern what is real and what has been blown way out of proportion. The really good manager will ask you to trim it down if it's a 25-page report. A bad manager will just sign after reading 1/4 of the report. Anyway, all in all, it's just a report to summarize what you have done the past year and the outcome. It's not a tool for you to build a fictional image like some people tend to believe it can do.

Then we also have to cross review people you have worked with over the year. This is especially bad for people like me who is involved in multiple projects directly or indirectly. It translates to getting tons of review requests in the mailbox. Either people think I am an easy reviewer or I am too friendly to think of them negatively. I get really a lot of review requests even from people I hardly remembered working with. For those people, I just replied with - "Not enough professional interactions to provide any useful performance feedback." For those whom I think negatively of, if I know his reputation is already bad, I don't mind providing improvement suggestions and leave it as that. For those whom people think highly of but I had a negative experience with, I just ignore the review request. For those whom I think positively of because they are technically strong and had shown real interest in what we do, I will write a strong positive review with improvement guidance, regardless of the person's reputation in the company. It happened to a person one year whom everybody was saying he is too dumb to be hired in the first place. I worked with him and I like his "can do" and "will learn right away" attitude. In fact, even though his knowledge was not good to begin with, he was able to complete the required tasks faster than an average engineer. His manager requested a meeting with me on him as everyone was quick to give him a bad review and asked me for details on why my review is positive and encouraging. Anyway, in the end the guy was asked to prove his technical strength by having to pass a certain technical exam by certain date or he will be put on 3-month probation. He did it and decided to move on to other opportunities. Good for him!!