The Annual Review Process

If you work for a large company (like I do), you might be subjected every year to the "Annual Review Process." This is always a fun process, one that puts everyone on their best behavior in the hopes that they'll get the raise they know they deserve more than anyone else in the company.

Because my company has so many employees all over the world, this process takes time and Company has gone to great lengths to both standardize and simplify the process. They've made great strides since last year, decreasing the number of required steps to a mere 492, a 12% improvement. They've also implemented a new web-based tool to use for all review documentation, which, in 3 or 4 years, I ought to have mastered.

Company's fiscal year runs September 1 - August 31. The annual review period runs June 1 - May 31, even though the associated pay raise (if any) is still not effective until September 1. Let the confusion begin.

Our review process consists of 2 main components, a written review and a "Throw You to the Wolves" session. I'll start with the latter.

In the Throw You to the Wolves session, all the senior executives get together to discuss everyone at a given level at a particular client site or home office location. They do a peer-to-peer comparison where each executive speaks to the merits of their own employees, and the executives (as a group) rank everyone on a scale of Average, Above Average or Walks on Water. (Of course, there's also Below Average and Who-the-Hell-Hired-This-Schmuck-in-the-First-Place?) Though they say it's not a "forced" distribution, it usually works out so that about 5% of the people Walk on Water, another 10-15% are Above Average, 60% are Average, and the rest should start looking for new jobs. These are, clearly, Top Secret, closed-door sessions, but apparently, it's the only way to make the process work. Mind you, once the ratings are done here, they're passed along to the "Southwest Region" (for example) for another round of rankings and then the "Country Region" and the "Continent Region" and then straight to Wizard of Oz himself. By the time Wizard gets them, the game of telephone that started in the conference room down the hall has taken it's toll, so Mr. Walks on Water from Florida is now about to be unemployed.

The second part of the process is the written review, which started last Fall, when I went to New Web Tool and entered my "objectives" for the year. There are 3 main categories of objectives and I was required to choose a minimum of 2-3 from a list within each. Over-achiever that I am, I decided to instead choose 5-6 from each category, plus a few new ones I made up on my own that I believed would make me a much more well-rounded employee. For each objective, I also needed to write a target. That is, how (at the end of the year) we're going to measure my success or failure against each objective. This process took a mere 26 hours, not including the time it took my supervisor to review the objectives, tell me they were crap, send them back to me to edit, review with him again, so on and so on until we found something that neither of us was really all that happy with, but it was deadline-for-submission day so we just put them through. (The "back and forth with Supervisor" took only another 14 hours, not so bad!)

At the beginning of this calendar year (lest you get confused by Fiscal Year or Annual Review Period Year), Supervisor and I did a mid-year review (that's mid-year of the Annual Review Period Year). This is the time during which he tells me where I'm falling short so I can spend the next several months trying to convince him I'm the best employee he's ever seen. The mid-year is supposed to benefit of my own "personal development." Whatever, it only took 8 hours. I'm not complaining.

Remember how I said the annual review year runs through end of May? Well, that's the time the paperwork all needs to be finalized, so of course, we start this in early April. I go back to New Web Tool, look at my mile-long list of objectives, and write a self assessment of how I did against them. I review the objective, the target, and write commentary on why I far exceeded the objective, or why it's not really all that bad that I forgot to address it. This takes only 32 hours, since New Web Tool crashed and lost all my changes only 4 times . Again, I send to my supervisor to review, and it becomes his turn to write the real review.

Let me talk for a minute about my supervisor. We have very frequent interactions (at least daily), even though we work in offices 1200 miles away from each other. We rely mostly on instant messaging, with the occasional phone call when he gets sick of typing in the little box on the screen, I'm arguing with him and he needs to shut me up, or there's something far too complex for me to possibly understand when it's in writing. (Dx, I'm sure you can relate ;-)

He's a really fun guy, even though most of the time he acts like he's pissed off at the world. I don't take it personally, and I can dish it out, too. No problem. The thing is, I also consider Supervisor to be a friend (he may disagree, but it's my blog, so too bad). The problem being "friends" with your supervisor is that sometimes (most times?), I turn off my filter. You know, the one that makes you stop and think "Do I really want my boss to know this?" or "Which are the best, most politically correct words to use when bringing this to my boss' attention?" Instead, I find myself writing IMs such as "Can you freakin' believe what just happened?" or "What an idiot!" Of course, this prompts Supervisor (who usually takes it all in stride but at the end of the day, still writes my review) to add comments under the Areas for Improvement section that say things like "Too negative; needs to focus on positive solutions rather than negative situations" or "Does not respect authority" or "Who the hell hired this schmuck in the first place?"

Anyway, after I write my self assessment and Supervisor writes his review, we meet to discuss. I've spent 32 hours pining over just the right words to convince him I'm the best employee he's ever seen, and he's written 4 sentences. What!?!?! Mind you, they are good sentences, but c'mon!!

Of course, Big Mouth over here has to question this. "What happened to everything I so painstakingly wrote? All the stuff I fed to you to put in my review??" He tells me that since he didn't disagree with it in his review, that means (by default) that he agrees with what I wrote. "So who's going to read the part I wrote? Doesn't yours carry more weight?" I ask. "No one reads them," he says. "It's just used for our own discussion so you know where you stand."

OK, people, I know where I stand. I knew that LONG before I started writing objectives and targets and commentary. I talk to this man every single day, and neither one of us is shy to give feedback. If I do something awesome, I don't hesitate for a second to tell him about it, usually more than once. And if I do something wrong? He'll surely be the first person to point it out to me, over and over again. I don't need a formal review meeting to tell me any of this. But hey, now my awesomeness and shortcomings are all "officially" documented in cyber-space on New Web Tool should anyone get really bored one day and decide to hack into the system to read them.

I'd be remiss if I did not add that his version of my review also includes feedback from my clients, peers, etc. This is always good information to have, but it's not like I don't already know what they're thinking. If I work with these people for a full Annual Review Period Year and don't know if they like me or think I suck, then I don't deserve to be employed. But, of course, always a bonus to have it on my permanent record.

Mind you, the Throw You to the Wolves sessions have already taken place for my level, so the written review we're discussing and agreeing on means nothing. Whatever was in his head about me on the day he walked into that room is what he said about me. Nothing I've stressed over in my self assessment or read in his review matters, and it's the Wolves (and of course, the Wizard) who decide if I get a raise or not.

So I pull out my calculator. Let's see.... I've spent a total of 91 hours so far this year on the process. I'm paid on salary but I'm a smart girl, not intimidated by long division. I can figure out my hourly rate. I do the math to see how much I've spent with The Process.

Now I do some very complicated statistical analysis on the average raises I've seen since Company went public. Assuming I get ranked as Above Average (optimistic, I know, but a girl can dream in her blog), that's an X% increase. Again, some math, and I realize that, lo and behold, the time spent working on my annual review versus the raise I might expect to get only puts me in the hole about $292. That's a savings of $48 from last year.

Woo hoo!! The process really does work!