Google Overhauls Performance Review System After Employee Criticism (theinformation.com) 29
Google is scrapping a time-consuming, twice-a-year staff performance review process in an effort to improve morale and reduce the time employees spend preparing the assessments, The Information reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the changes. From the report: CEO Sundar Pichai told staff Wednesday that the new program, which will take place only once a year, aims to give more employees a sense of accomplishment and acknowledge that "most Googlers are doing great work." The new system, which also creates an easier path to promotions, came after only 53% of Googlers said in surveys that the current system is "time well spent," Pichai said. The change makes Google the latest Silicon Valley company to switch to less-frequent reviews. Meta last year said it would conduct performance reviews once per year rather than twice. Google has for years conducted extensive performance review processes twice a year through a process that required extensive preparation from employees and managers. Now, the review process will happen once a year and staff won't have to prepare packets of information ahead of time, the company told employees. The company will still consider promotions twice a year.
My Company Went The Other Way (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: My Company Went The Other Way (Score:3)
Re: My Company Went The Other Way (Score:2)
"In fact I was told to work on their goals and progress every day. Every day. It's part of why I left."
Belueve me, I'm sure you are not the only one who left. Very few things kill morale more and make employees jump ship so fast than having someone constantly breathing down your neck.
This is micromanagement at it's worst.
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I came here to ask about doing a continuous system instead. It'd be hard to setup what I'm imagining, but it seems better than the drek you all seem to be dealing with. It sounds like the Office Space thing with 8 bosses, where now your bosses boss is hounding you about what they need quarterly.
My idea was to just put in feedback continuously. If you worked with someone then easily put in a note about them and maybe a few ratings to judge important stuff (did the work get done well, would you work with t
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One way to look at this is that if the company wants you to spend time doing these quarterly reports, that's fine as long as they are paying you your salary to do it on their dime. Ballpark the amount of time you spend on your review, multiply that by the number of reviews per year (4), multiply that by the number of employees who work for the company, and multiply that by the minimum hourly wage. Then, if you are feeling cheeky, let management know how much those mandatory quarterly reviews are costing t
Re:My Company Went The Other Way (Score:4, Interesting)
My company got acquired and they went from yearly to quarterly.
However, instead of being horrendously high overhead, the quarterly system became more streamlined. Before you had to fill out a huge survey and provided written explanations justifying your ratings on a bunch of criteria. The average person took around 8 hours to fill out this self-evlauation. Then you submitted it, and three or four of your peers would be required to fill out the form about you, again with examples, though this usually took maybe a couple of hours each, so another day for people. Then this was combined with your manager's evaluation to form your complete evaluation including whether goals were met, set new goals, etc. At the end, it was a process that pretty much took a week of everyone's time to do.
The quarterly system was extremely streamlined down to three questions. "Did you meet expectations" with a scale from "Did not meet expectations" to "Exceeded expectations", aiming for the middle "Met expectations".
Then the two questions were "How did you come about that rating" where you basically answer what happened, simple short and sweet, maybe 2-3 lines if you include an example. The next question was "Things to consider going forward" where you could better yourself. Not goals that could be hit or miss, but areas that need improvement.
It burdens the manager more, but not as much as the old system and you get the feedback you need without a lot of the time wasting reiterating how you did on each thing you worked on.
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These things make managers want to put everyone in the center rating as there is less visibility and justification needed to explain that people are "doing their job" versus excelling or underperforming.
Not sure if that is a bad thing or not.
I am a bit perplexed they'd waste this much time (Score:2)
Those companies are so brutally and intrinsically for printing money
What's happening? We need to talk about your TPS (Score:5, Funny)
What's happening? We need to talk about your TPS reports.
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Did you get the memo?
Google overhauls performance Review System (Score:2)
FTFY.
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in the wake of multiple Unionization efforts and a whole lot of older folk retiring instead of coming back into covid filled offices and dying for the sake of mega corp property values.
They really screwed the pooch with the ageist stuff. The meme of the useless older person who doesn't keep up is just a meme, and a bad one at that.
The lack of mentoring, the cut the staff to the bare minimum with no apprentice type employees, in order to hire some more accountants is coming home to roost.
Which is why I'm back at work, having an offer I could hardly refuse. At least my folks appreciate the issues. The skillset is a combination of technical savvy and ability to work with highly stress
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The lack of mentoring, the cut the staff to the bare minimum with no apprentice type employees, in order to hire some more accountants is coming home to roost.
A big part of the problem is a social one. We teach kids at a young age that older people have outdated thoughts and values. We have changed our culture to one that use to respect the wisdom that comes with age to one that sees people of a certain age as unable to adapt to social norms and having little value.
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The lack of mentoring, the cut the staff to the bare minimum with no apprentice type employees, in order to hire some more accountants is coming home to roost.
A big part of the problem is a social one. We teach kids at a young age that older people have outdated thoughts and values. We have changed our culture to one that use to respect the wisdom that comes with age to one that sees people of a certain age as unable to adapt to social norms and having little value.
Which of course is bullshit on the part of those who believe us older fartes are left behind. It actually bothered our millenials that I knew more than they did about everything we were working with.
And we're reaping the rewards of that. Our young people came full of unearned self esteem, not understanding that they only knew the basics, and that those gross people who were their parents age had more knowledge and definitely a lot more experience than they did. I saw so many crash and burns that I reviewe
At every employer I ever had (Score:2)
Digging up minutia to justify a smaller raise for top performers.
Handling situations where management's opinion of an individual's performance was radically different from reality.
hire to to fire as well (Score:2)
hire to to fire as well
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I am a big believer that annual reviews should be brief and just used for pay increases. A good manager should be communicating with their staff and nothing new should be in an annual review. The annual review should be a quick recap for historical records but no more than that.
Every annual review I have given (or received), basically consists of the other person wanting to skip to the "did I get a raise" portion.
Never in my life had a performance review (Score:3)
Is this an Silicon Valley thing, an American thing, a "really big corporation" thing, or a combination of some of them? Perhaps "really big corporation in region with weak employee protection laws"?
It's just a rather alien concept to me. Around here it's generally accepted that you can't benchmark your employees' performance like you might a computer's. Even if you could, it wouldn't do you much good as you can't just fire someone for "not doing the job as well as we think someone else we might decide to hire could". We have a yearly one hour "talk with the boss" where we to some extent evaluate each other, although it's in the form of "do more of " and "do less of" and perhaps some goals for the next year rather than a pass/fail sort of thing. Its intent is more of a formal way to air any issues rather than a review. The preparation consists of printing out the paper and filling in some notes if you feel like it. I can barely even imagine what "preparing packets of information" in this context might entail.
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Is this an Silicon Valley thing, an American thing, a "really big corporation" thing, or a combination of some of them? Perhaps "really big corporation in region with weak employee protection laws"?
It's just a rather alien concept to me. Around here it's generally accepted that you can't benchmark your employees' performance like you might a computer's. Even if you could, it wouldn't do you much good as you can't just fire someone for "not doing the job as well as we think someone else we might decide to hire could". We have a yearly one hour "talk with the boss" where we to some extent evaluate each other, although it's in the form of "do more of " and "do less of" and perhaps some goals for the next year rather than a pass/fail sort of thing. Its intent is more of a formal way to air any issues rather than a review. The preparation consists of printing out the paper and filling in some notes if you feel like it. I can barely even imagine what "preparing packets of information" in this context might entail.
Might be a difference in language or something? Back when I got reviews, it was a formal sort of thing. There was different qualities they would judge, from timeliness to interactions with others, to general attitude and general performance, plus professional development.
Offenses that might get you terminated would generally get you a writeup. If you got a certain number of them, you were gone. Offenses of that nature were sexual harassment, intoxication at work, consistent tardiness, more severe type th
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The post was talking about how both the employee and manager needed to spend a lot of time building a tiny mountain of documentation prior to these reviews. That doesn't sound like just a difference in language to me, it sounds like a very different process altogether.
The "reviews" I'm used to is a slightly more formal chat with the manager I already talk to on a more or less daily basis about anything and everything anyway. The literal translation of it is "co-worker conversation". Whatever Google is doing
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The post was talking about how both the employee and manager needed to spend a lot of time building a tiny mountain of documentation prior to these reviews. That doesn't sound like just a difference in language to me, it sounds like a very different process altogether.
Odd - I'm seeing it as similar, you are telling my that it is completely different. We shall delve into that.
The "reviews" I'm used to is a slightly more formal chat with the manager I already talk to on a more or less daily basis about anything and everything anyway. The literal translation of it is "co-worker conversation". Whatever Google is doing sounds closer to court proceedings or defending a doctoral thesis.
You must do completely different court proceedings or doctoral thesis defense than we do. In any event - a doctoral defense and a court proceeding isn't ever considered the same over here. No swearing on bibles or making an affirmation no juries, no policemen giving testimony nothing like that. The candidate presents, and the advisor and notable others give feedback and decide. Stressful for certain
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Odd - I'm seeing it as similar, you are telling my that it is completely different. We shall delve into that.
You must do completely different court proceedings or doctoral thesis defense than we do
I think you may have taken me more literally than I imagined you might. The summary mentioned requiring "extensive preparation" and producing "packets of information". I was pointing out the rather wide gap between that and the "ok, let's go have our yearly chat" of the system I'm comparing it to, and thus my perception that the sort of reviews Google and comparable companies seem to do comes across as akin to needing to prove you deserve to keep working there.
or the firing of Google's ethics head, Margaret Mitchell who spied on company employees to determine who was correct thinking or not - IOW a completely unethical act.
Not to mention outright illegal, around here. I
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or the firing of Google's ethics head, Margaret Mitchell who spied on company employees to determine who was correct thinking or not - IOW a completely unethical act.
Not to mention outright illegal, around here. If it turned out a former employee might have something in their mailbox that we need, we'd reactivate their account and call them to ask if they could forward it to us before we'd even considered using admin access to go look for it. Employee privacy is a huge deal, as it's generally accepted that people utilize work equipment for personal use as well.
I don't know if you read her story, but Google had terminated an employee, name of Timnit Gebru, who was pushing back against Google asking her not to publish her article of how artificial intelligence discriminates against people of color and women. But there was more. https://docs.google.com/docume... [google.com]
Gebru demanded that certain conditions be met or she would resign, like the names of all those involved in the review process and every single person who Jeff Dean the head of reviews, plus the other pers
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Even if you could, it wouldn't do you much good as you can't just fire someone...
No, but when it comes to decide who should get raises in excess of cost-of-living adjustments, who should get the big bonuses, etc. it's helpful to have a good understanding of who your top employees are. They're the ones you want to reward and hopefully retain.
In such a system the review is for the benefit of the employee. If their overall compensation is affected by the company's perception of their performance, the company has an obligation to be transparent with the employee about how their performa
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Fair point. The pay structure here is pretty flat, though. Some 70% of the country has wages negotiated through unions (I'm not part of that group), so not on an individual basis. As for how my performance is perceived, I get that continuously throughout the year, and via the yearly talk. We don't use actual numbers on paper metrics, but we talk about it. I stopped caring all that much about my paycheck once I earned enough to never have to worry about paying my bills, even if spending a lot on my grown man
Never took to the performance review (Score:2)
After decades, I still hate the process, even when things are smooth and all feedback is good.
I told my current boss that and he understood. If I'm not doing what's expected, just tell me. There is nothing worse than goals. They always change from where things started.
My employer was recently bought by a private equity company. Now my boss who didn't make reviews a thing, sends me an email about goals and accomplishments. All good things ...
No good solution to performance reviews (Score:3)
If you grade on a curve, you set up unhealthy competition. If you don't, then each manager has an incentive to rank their employees higher.
Attempts at "quantifiable metrics" never work, because a lot of science and engineering can't be easily quantified.
I've never seen a good solution, managers and employees both hate performance reviews, but at the same time, what alternative is there?
First sign of a toxic workplace (Score:2)
Browser histories (Score:3)