Accentuate the Positive

A song from 1944 sets the tone for good employee feedback. This episode features an upbeat cover from 1972, and far too many sandwich metaphors, yet still offers hope for great performance reviews.

Annual Ritual

First episode of two looking into the annual ritual of performance reviews. This episode focuses on the process, and why it doesn’t have to be painful. If you’re willing to do it all the time.

Duck and Cover

How a brutal performance review meeting ended with me getting a stapler hurled at my head. And how that lead to one of my most steadfast rules: in the workplace, no surprises.

The Brainpower Age

How a simple question about failure of a single project lead to the most important research project of my life. And how that lead to the realization that everything about work has changed in the last few generations. We’ve entered the Brainpower Age.

Help Me, Help My Boss

Recently, a good friend of mine told me the story of a sick performance review and reward system. I mean “sick” as ill, broken, maybe even sickening — not “sick” as the youth today refer to something really cool. The system bases rewards on the performance feedback from those around [...]

Crime of the Perfect Review

I just got forwarded an amazing thing: a perfect performance review. Actually, if you’re a manager or, especially a manager of managers, you’ve probably seen more than one of these in your career. The performance review with nothing but the highest possible scores, and not a word of anything that [...]

Microsoft Changes Performance Review Scoring

Microsoft just announced a number of changes in personnel policies designed to improve sagging morale. Good for them. It’s the result of a year of work by a longtime colleague of mine and now SVP of HR, Lisa Brummel. According to the reports, she spent a year listening to people [...]

What time of year is best for reviews?

Set the time for reviews to be off-schedule from your main business processes, especially budgeting. The last thing you want is for your team to be overwhelmed with non-line-of-business work, or to give either budgetting or reviews short shrift. Neither your business, nor your employees will appreciate that. For example, [...]

How often should we do reviews?

Immediately after an organization decides to do performance reviews, the first thing they ask is: how often should we do them? There is very real tension between providing enough feedback to the employees, and making painful busy work for the management team. Fortunately there is a good compromise that many [...]