Shreyas Doshi’s Post

I realized this a year ago, so I changed the way we do performance appraisal instead of having annual evaluation and calibration, we asked every team member to collect ‘evidence’ of their performance every month and the manager will give a sign off that they acknowledge how each team member viewed their performance on that month if there is a different in perception between manager and the team member, the manager can always do a 1:1 and clarify things together at the end of the year, instead of having 1 recent photograph, we have 12 callibrated photographs for each team member, still not as good as a movie but we can decrease the recency bias of it

That's why I ask my team mates to journal and self-brag, and I try to add brags to their journals whenever I feel and remember to. Helps everyone have a log of good things to refer later when performance review happens. Also it has the side effect (or maybe it's the main one and logging is a secondary?) to give everyone a moment of self reflection, to better see where we are and where we want to be.

Every good performance evaluations should be at least 60% continuous appraisal i.e. feedback given on - work product - workplace behaviour throughout the year. Heck if it's strictly work performance, we might get better performance appraisal when we unleash AI on Jira tasks, weekly reports and KPI dashboards.

Indeed. Performance feedback should take place on a (near) real-time basis, as that's when it will most likely result in positive change. If your direct reports are ever surprised by any issue raised in an annual review, you haven't been doing your job.

What team size ranges roughly work to be a good decision maker? Or maybe this is not a constraint for others. I find teams are sometimes too big for budget holders to understand the context of long term impact of each individual (even if the culture is best possible)

So fundamentally we should look at a metric over a period of time and understand it's curve rather than at a period of time...is that the way forward?

So true! There's a lot of recency bias in performance reviews, so it can also be easy to game the system. Not how it should be, but it is :(

Shreyas curious how you would approach it. Do you have proven methods that have worked better for your team? Great thought. Thanks for sharing

Do you guys think writen 2 weeks update good to capture "the film"?

The other side of this coin - many employees and even leaders know this, so many visibility oriented initiatives spin up couple months before appraisal cycles, only to be lost immediately after - such a sheer waste of time and resources, just to gain brownie points or a fast promotion. Deserving folks on the other hand focus on their longer term impact, and don’t get their dues. Sad reality of corporate setup.