Ellen's blog: Feedback loop

It is the time of year when my employer conducts the annual appraisal process. Having been a contractor for a while, this is the first time in two years that I have been through the permanent employee annual rating process, including the cringingly embarrassing self-appraisal (do you rate yourself as average to show humility and then end up at the bottom of the pile……or do you rate yourself as ‘above average’ and appear to be an ego-maniac)??

 

My current employer only introduced an appraisal process last year, so it is new to most people and the process of collecting feedback for inclusion in an appraisal process is rather unstructured.

 

In previous companies the appraisal process has been very prescriptive: “please provide feedback in the following format: what has the employee done to demonstrate their commitment to the company’s values of excellence, innovation, relentlessness and mediocrity? How much excellence did they show? On how many times have they innovated? Were they relentless in their pursuit of our corporate vision? etc. Providing feedback on other people took hours to structure in the required format (for very little value-add), as it was a requirement to fill each of the boxes with roughly the same number of words (indicating a ‘balanced view’ obviously). 

 

So earlier today, I was feeling keen to exploit the absence of guidelines, and sent a few lines to 4 of my ‘stakeholders’ asking them to provide some feedback on my performance to my boss. To get them started I even provided a few helpful memory-jogging suggestions of things I thought I’d done well (obviously I was careful to avoid any mention of anything which had delivered a sub-optimal outcome).

 

Some lovely un-structured praise came back from 2 of them who hadn’t appreciated that feedback-etiquette generally means not Cc’ing the subject in order to ensure that there is no opportunity for compromising of authenticity. Due to the time of year, I can not discount the possibility that they were feeling overly-festive, or had just had a drink a lunch time but I was very grateful to hear some positive words at a time when I am feeling rather vulnerable due to the merger of my firm with another, which means I will need to compete with my future colleagues for the chance to earn a job in the future TOM (as in Target Operating Model, not as in Tom Jones). 

 

I sent a few lines of feedback on others to their respective bosses, which I wrote in free-format and with no regard for which part of which form it would need to end up in. The process was amazingly quick and effective - and I no longer dread receiving feedback requests. Additionally, when you are not asked to specifically provide improvement points you don’t feel compelled to write something for the sake of filling the box. 

 

Perhaps my firm’s new (evolving/maturing) approach to employee appraisals is something that other more mature organisations would benefit from emulating?