A few days ago, several netizens approached me to talk about performance appraisal, and they were all friends who were badly evaluated on performance. After a general understanding of the situation, I found that the reason for their frustration and depression was not entirely because they did not do a good job, but they had some doubts about their failure to do what the company entrusted to them, because I clearly felt that they There is an error in the company's standard definition of whether a thing is done well. On the other hand, they also admit to their own work problems. What made them more frustrated, though, was that the company, manager, or HR had a conversation with them that made them feel like they were being totally rejected, or even criticized. This feeling is really bad.
Because I have a similar experience, I want to write an article here to talk about my own feelings about some performance appraisals. Let me first give my two opinions:
1) The purpose of setting goals and performance is not to evaluate people, but to improve the performance and efficiency of organizations and people.
2) People are complex, and people are subject to fluctuations. People should not be easily denied at any time. Performance appraisal should assess things, not people.
I personally hold the opinion that ** performance points should be given to projects, products, departments, codes, not people. **However, the current management system basically beats people, and many managers and HR who are not good at management at all, as well as many people who eat melons who can’t think independently, basically point the finger at individuals, so of course there will be criticisms. will feel.
to give a few examples
In order to clarify my above point of view, please let me lay the groundwork first and give a few examples.
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Su Buqing's grades were terrible in elementary school, and she was last in her class.
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Hua Luogeng failed the math test when he was in school. If it wasn't for the encouragement of Mr. Wang Weike and made him fall in love with mathematics, he might have been completely buried.
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When Zheng Yuanjie was in school, the teacher asked to write "The early bird gets eaten by the worm", Zheng Yuanjie sang the opposite and wrote "The early worm gets eaten by the bird", and the math teacher got into trouble, so he was expelled. Since then, Zheng Yuanjie has not gone to school for a day.
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Levlsthai was born in a noble family. He lost his mother at the age of 2 and his father at the age of 9. He went to university at the age of 16. He automatically dropped out of school in his third year and went home to reform. If you don't study well in your youth, you fail the exam and repeat your grades. He borrows money, fools around...
There are too many examples of this. I will give a few sports-related examples from another aspect. Maybe young friends don’t know it. You can ask your parents.
In the 1980s, China had a group of very good sports players, such as: Li Ning, the prince of gymnastics, Zhu Jianhua, who broke the world high jump record, Ma Wenge, the world champion of table tennis, and Zhao Jianhua, the world champion of badminton. I remember that they participated in the world competition one year. They lost all, and they lost badly. So some domestic media and people began to scold them, and even said they were the scum and shame of the nation, and many people came to teach them a lesson...
If we take the performance score as the test score in the school, then do you think like me that the test score can only represent the person's mastery or understanding of these knowledge points, and only at this point in time, it does not represent at all This person can't do it at all, and it doesn't mean that he can't do it all the time. Because there are too many classmates who have been expelled from the school because of failing subjects, it is not necessarily that these people have no life in society. On the contrary, some of them may be able to live well with good test scores. Is not it? Are there still few such examples around us?
Therefore, when I saw a certain HR say an old employee—“If he leaves today, he will definitely be fired by the company because of performance issues in the next year”, in addition to feeling ridiculous that there are human beings who can predict the future of others In addition, I feel a kind of sadness, a kind of sadness in the management system. I feel that a very strong undercurrent and invisible force behind this HR evaluation made her do such an incredible thing.
Many companies also evaluate values, and the values are understandable. I think the values of a company are very necessary, but evaluating the values is a very dangerous thing . There are too many people in this world who sing against the traditional forces, and there are too many people who have been identified as having problems with their values and have been persecuted. Lao She, who was criticized, insulted and beaten; Turing, who committed suicide because of homosexuality and persecution; Bruno, who was imprisoned for 8 years because he disagreed with the church's views and was unwilling to give up his faith and was eventually burned to death... Enough is enough, this should not happen again in the new era, no matter how big or small.
The biggest problem with assessing values is that it is very easy to get on the line, it is very easy to create political struggles, and it is very easy to stifle all kinds of ideas. To be honest, this is to a large extent a means of brainwashing - through To create a tension or fear of people to achieve the purpose of controlling the mind.
What to say to the company and managers
Now let me talk about some of my views on performance appraisal. Before talking about this point, you can take a look at this news article - " Performanceism Ruined Sony ". In recent years, the struggle to "abandon performance appraisal" has spread from Adobe, Dell, Microsoft, and Amazon in technology companies to consulting service companies such as Deloitte, Accenture, and PricewaterhouseCoopers . Even General Electric (GE), the one-time grandfather of performance management, announced it was ditching formal annual performance reviews. In the past 2016, Zhang Xiaolong of Tencent issued a call for "warning KPIs" to the WeChat business group; Li Yanhong blamed Baidu's lag behind "the pursuit of short-term KPIs from management to employees" in an internal letter; Lei Jun simply announced that Xiaomi "Continue to adhere to the strategy of 'removing KPIs', let go of the burden, untangle the ropes, and do things happily." Wang Shi also sighed in his personal Weibo: "Performanceism is like an abscess of a company."
In essence, performance appraisal is like school education based on scores, and it is a reason to ignore employee growth and quality education . When students and teachers only focus on test scores, and only test scores are used to evaluate teachers and students' good and bad, teachers and students will begin to use some very formal methods to achieve this goal, such as: rote quilt, memorize routines , Tactics of the sea... And the evaluation of learning ability has completely reduced to a formalism. On the contrary, the higher the score, the more brain-dead. (Note: The current education in the United States does not allow the ability of teachers to be evaluated by student test scores)
In recent years, some large companies have started to use OKR – Objectives, Key Result, but in practice, I found that some companies use OKR, which is essentially KPI – Key Performance Indicator, because OKR has a Key Result, which is used to measure Objectives result indicator. Therefore, users habitually set up KPIs. I personally think OKRs have three very big characteristics: 0) they are proposed by employees, 1) they are goal-oriented. 2) Shared by all members.
For example, OKRs might be formulated as follows:
Objectives: Enhance user experience,
Key Results：
1) User operation steps are reduced by more than 20%,
2) Customer service reduces work orders by more than 40%,
3) The response time of 99.9% of the user's system operations is less than 100ms
Then, decompose this goal into product, user experience, and technical teams, form sub-objectives and associate them with the corresponding parent's Key Result, for example, the Objectives defined by the product department: 1) Optimize the registration process, reduce 2 steps, 2 ) Optimize the red envelope algorithm to make it easier for users to understand, 3) Improve product quality and reduce user complaints. The Objectives defined by the back-end technical team: 1) Define SLA and related monitoring indicators, 2) Automate operation and maintenance, reduce failure recovery time, 3) Improve performance, the response time of 99.9% of the throughput under xxxqps is xxms …
This Objective will be decomposed from the top of the company to the front-line employees. The information is completely transparent. Everyone can see that everyone is decomposed into goals. Everyone knows what kind of goals they are striving for, and everyone can question them. , improvements, and suggested adjustments to top-level goals and directions. Instead of receiving information that has been digested layer by layer, second-hand, third-hand, or even fourth- or fifth-hand information.
The biggest problem of KPI is to use the Key Results in OKR as the goal, so that employees only know what to do, don't know why, don't know why, can't understand the goal, and the work becomes a real deal!
As early as 1933, Panasonic Corporation convened 168 employees to publicize Panasonic's long-term planning goals for the next 250 years. Since 1956, it has regularly announced and interpreted its "five-year plan" to help each employee's vision. Moving away from immediate short-term interests and establishing one's own ideals and goals also promotes Panasonic's sustainable development.
However, today is different from the past. With the continuous reduction of product cycles, the continuous influx of competitors, and the frequent iteration of high-tech, the changes and adjustments of corporate strategies have become more frequent, and the business strategy of changing every day has become the norm of the military. In the process, how many employees understand the adjusted strategy? How many times have employees' performance indicators been adjusted to the strategy?
KPI itself is a passive, post-examination that examines whether the employee's behavior meets the standard after the work is completed. Therefore, employees are indifferent to the company's goals and only care about their own KPIs, because this is their own best interest. In order to achieve KPIs, some employees start to think without thinking and use some simple and rude gameplay. In fact, this is harmful to the company. , also hurt himself. Your own growth and progress are also left behind because of strong KPIs.
Of course, KPI performance appraisal generally does not necessarily destroy the company. On the contrary, it may be helpful for labor-intensive companies that like to use brute force. However, KPIs must destroy the culture of the team. And the challenging spirit of the team, as well as innovation and enthusiasm for the cause, will even make the people among them lose their normal judgment (can't distinguish between sufficient and necessary conditions, and can't distinguish the causal relationship of many things) .
What to say to professionals
So, for individuals, how to face the performance appraisal given by the company? How to face their performance appraisal?
Or use school test scores for comparison. If we say that heroes are judged by test scores, a person with high scores in the test is a talent with performance, and a person who fails the test is a scum, right? of course not. Maybe it is only for exams that people can be divided into three, six and nine, but for the whole life, there is no very direct causal relationship between exam results and a person's achievements in this society. Faced with the reality of society, there are many examples of people with good grades working for those with poor grades.
What am I trying to say? What I want to say is - face the score that the company gives you with a normal heart, because it does not represent your whole life. However, you have to take your personal development and growth with a very serious heart, because that's what really needs to be taken seriously.
In other words, if you want to give a person a performance score, it's not based on what a company can do in a short period of time, but what that person can achieve in a long period of time.
Just as WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton failed an interview for Facebook in 2009, but 5 years later, he sold his company to FaceBook for $19 billion. Isn't it the same with Alibaba's Jack Ma? I was rejected in various ways when looking for a job, and the first company I started did not perform well. 20 years ago, a bunch of people said that Ma Yun could not do this or that. However, what happened next? On the other hand, many professional managers perform very well in the company, and then they do very badly in the startup company. What does this mean?
This is like animals, some animals are suitable for living in water, some animals are suitable for living on land, fish cannot survive on land, you let tigers do the work of swimming, you let the fish do the work of birds , what can you check? Each of us has an environment that suits us, and finding the environment that suits us is the most important thing! Instead of paying attention to what others say about you, find an environment that works for you.
Therefore, performance appraisal in a specific environment does not mean anything, and those practices that try to use performance appraisal to deny a person are more or less "fascist" or "red guard" play .
All right! Let's stop talking about performance appraisal, let's go back, let's really improve ourselves, let ourselves grow, and let our strong topics come up. Here, I need to quote an article " Do the Right Thing, Wait to get fired ", which refers to a sentence from the book " Team Geek "
Do the right thing and wait to be fired.
New Googlers (we call them "Nooglers") often ask me how I make myself so productive. I told them, half-jokingly, that it was simple: I chose to do the right thing, for Google, for the world, and then went back to my seat and waited to be fired. If not fired, then I'm doing the right thing - for everyone. If you get fired, you picked the wrong boss. All in all, I'm a winner on both counts . This is my career development strategy.
Just to be clear, "do the right thing and get fired" isn't chicken soup, it's something that makes you stronger. Because the strong are self-improving, only the strong can pursue the truth, not compromise.
Well, ** test scores are not the key, nor are other people's evaluations of you. KPIs are not the key, nor are OKRs the key. Whether you are doing the right thing or not is the key! **Isn't that so?
other
When I was in my fourth year of college, I felt that I was about to leave school, and I wanted to do something I never had the chance to do in the future. After thinking about it, I have never failed in school for so many years, so I took a willful way, failed a subject, and went to make up the exam. I also received some jokes from classmates and criticism from teachers when I failed the class, but it made me feel that my school experience was more complete. Because, at the age of 22, I experienced and probably understood some of the truth of life.
From working in 1998 to 2013, like a good student, I have never had any work performance problems. Anyway, I often become a standard person at work, but I don’t have eggs. Only my own growth is the most real thing. a feeling of. "Do the right thing and get fired" is probably the craziest and right thing I've ever done in my career. Because, it gives me more experience, it makes me improve from the right things, it also makes me stronger and stronger, it also allows me to find more challenging things, and it makes me more aware of myself. clear understanding.
In the end, I know that someone will come to me, so in the end, I want to leave a paragraph for those who still want to deny people through performance.
If you have doubts about my performance or technical ability, no problem, then I hope you can do what I have done below, and then spray me again, thank you!
" When you are 40 years old, when your father is seriously ill, your children have problems going to school, your mortgage has not been paid off, you are the only source of income for your family, etc., quit your current job, don't join any company, don't need to Save any penny of your own, don't need anyone's investment and help. Only through your own technical ability, solve corresponding technical problems for others (do not do any non-technical outsourcing projects), to survive and support your family, and in addition to being able to take care of I wish my family didn't lower my living standard, but I can support 3 engineers with an annual salary of 360,000 yuan each. "
May I ask how many points this performance can be scored? Ha ha.