Is everyone paranoid about their performance appraisals?

dlowan said:

I am having a bit of trouble interpreting this, deb. I'm hoping it went well.

You're a pod, though.

dlowan wrote:
Apt, very apt.

You guys make me feel very lucky!!

Oddly enough, I was chatting about this to a friend at lunch, and she was asking if the things were helpful or not.

I was thinking that, although mine have been useful and positive, you'd only need a disturbed or nasty supervisor to make it into a real bullying tool. Or a disturbed and nasty worker...we've had trouble in the past even when saying that a student on placement has not been able to function well or appropriately enough to pass (and we have had a couple of obvious total loonies who ought to have been failed by the universities they have come from at least a year before we ever had to cope with them).

Doh! Yes, I left out the "well".

oh, good, I'm glad it was "well".

No kids; thier ages range from a low of about 20 to a high of about 45.

How true!

When I worked at Williams-Sonoma, I once wore an outfit that consisted of a pair of leggings under a dress skimmed the top of my knees. As we had to wear enclosed shoes, I wore a pair of Swedish-made, thick leather mary janes that I loved with ankle socks.

I had no idea that there was a company policy against wearing leggings. The manager pulled me into the stock room and read me the riot act.

Now, she would praise me to my face about my ability to focus on who a customer is and to talk to them the way they wanted to be spoken to. She would tell other employes about my wit and how she enjoyed what I had to say . . . which I don't think is right: positive or negative, a manager does not discuss employes.

Several months later, at my annual review, there was nothing about my ability to work with customer, nothing about my wit. Instead, there was a line that I "sometimes come to work inappropriately dressed."

Rather than receiving the annual raise of 25 cents, I was given 21 cents.

When I used to give performance evaluations to personnel
(professional and support staff) in my law firm,
I made a conscious effort to be nice about it
and to try to make everyone feel good n appreciated.

Its nice to be important
but its MORE important to be nice.

If thay 'd made errors, I did not wait until review time
to call those errors to their attention.





David

I hate appraisals and mostly I haven't found them helpful!

Some time back, when I had a really twisted boss, they were an absolute nightmare. Now they're not so bad - but they don't appear to have any relationship to remuneration. If we get a pay rise, we all get the same percentage - what's with that?

When I get performance appraisals, I now make a conscious effort to be nice about how I receive those appraisals, ever since the head of my department did my first one. We weren't friends yet - we had just met and he had to observe me do a lesson and give me an appraisal.

Everything was good, except one little bit of constructive criticism he had for me and I could see that he didn't want to say it, so I started getting really nervous thinking, 'What did I do that was SO bad that he doesn't even want to tell me?' so I just said, 'I can see you have something you want to tell me about how I can improve - I'd like to hear it- so please don't feel bad about telling me what you think.'
So he said, 'Your manner with the students is a little informal for my taste. Nothing inappropriate or anything- the classroom environment is really nice - it feels like a team or a family , but I just feel that it might lead to you having difficulties in terms of managing negative behaviors in the classroom if there's not a very clear line drawn from the beginning.'
I knew exactly what he was talking about - I'd been told that many times before and I told him that I understood what he was saying and thanked him for his input.
I thought he was going to keel over in his chair and faint from shock. And then he said something that was probably inappropriate for him to say to me as it involved another colleague. He said, 'Thank God it didn't happen again - last week I did an appraisal on so and so and I said all good things but I had one little bit of constructive criticism - she hadn't written her learning goal for the session on the board at the beginning of the class and I reminded her of this and she burst out crying and said that indeed she had. And I KNEW she hadn't. He said, 'It was surreal! Every appraisal since then, if I have any small word of criticism, I feel that I better get ready for hysterics.'

He and I got to be really good friends, to the point he could no longer be the one to appraise me (as it wouldn't have been objective) and we team-taught and it was good, because we did have very different styles - and he could be the rule enforcer- I used to be sitting at the back grading papers or something and if a kid did something wrong - I'd nearly jump out of my seat because he'd surprise me by his vehement and loud directives to stop.

My new performance appraiser is alright - I can be honest with her. The first time she watched me she said I didn't use my peer tutor enough. So the next time I used him a lot and she said I used him too much. I just looked at her and smiled and said, 'Jane - can you come do a lesson and show me exactly how much to use my peer tutor, because according to you I either use him too little or too much- I think it would be helpful for me to see what the expectations are before the next appraisal.'

She smiled back and agreed to help me out with it.

Well, at least you GET pay rises!!!

I am sorry you had a twisted boss.

: (

I used to abhor when that happened,
not so much during annual performance review,
but incidental to stenografy. When one of my secretaries gave me
some dictation for signature, of course I had to proofread it.
This was before the advent of computers with wordprocessing programs.
Thay used typewriters.
When I corrected their stenografy (red ink on the paper)
sometimes thay were so frustrated that thay broke down in tears,
if thay had re-typed the page too many times, in their opinions.
I had some of them resign, in fits of self-deprecation.

I never got mad at them about stenografy errors,
ESPECIALLY not after the first episode of stenografical weeping.

I always hated when that happened.
I learned to be extra nice & supersweet
when having them re-type, to avoid personnel hysteria.
I used to console them that thay were there for 8 hours a day
and it shoud not matter to them whether thay type 100 pages once
or type 1 page 100 times. That argument proved to be unpursuasive.





David

i worked at one place that had a union, and we all received the same predetermined-by-contract percentage...

Well, I've been on the job a month and a half shy of 18 years. Mostly gave them my all. They know it and have always given me the highest rating.

xxx ?

You know, I wonder if I ma more paranoid because the skills and personal attributes I am being rated on are kind of nebulous?

It's not like i make widgets.

Oh for a widget!

Whuchoo tawkin bout, wabbit?

The advantages of more tangible jobs in the performance appraisal thereof.