IT careers: How to get a fair performance review

Ian Raloff still remembers the sting of bad timing that sabotaged one of his performance reviews earlier in his career, when he held a job at a telecom company.

As the annual performance review period neared, a problem cropped up on a new type of server that nobody was trained on. Raloff, then a systems administrator, was assigned to solve the problem. “Something weird happened, and it took me a while to fix it,” he recalls. “That [snafu] was in the mind of the assessor,” who was also part of the new IT management team. “I got a bad assessment and was ranked out of a bonus in my department.”

It was little consolation when, shortly after the review, he was recognized individually three times at an all-IT meeting with other department leaders for his contributions to successful projects throughout the year.

“That [incident is] partially what led me to leaving the company,” Raloff recalls. He had been doing a good job all year but, just as new management came on board, “things didn’t work right on something I was in charge of and I looked bad.”

Computerworld

Raloff’s experience apparently isn’t unique: IT workers are expressing a good deal of frustration about the way their work is recognized and rewarded. In a September 2015 Computerworld survey of 244 IT professionals, 44% of the respondents said they aren’t being fairly or accurately assessed under the current review process at their companies. Some are unhappy because their employers have no performance assessment at all, others are frustrated with perceived biases in their reviews, and still others take issue with the method of assessment their employers use.

“Frankly I think the traditional performance review process is ineffective at evaluating performance, employee worth to the organization and providing incentive for improving performance,” says an IT manager at a furniture manufacturer.

Thorough assessments have become more challenging to administer as IT employees branch out into business units and have to answer to many project overseers. Managers struggle to find time to complete detailed performance assessments on large numbers of direct reports, and some are asked to weigh in on workers they barely know.

Many companies also set corporatewide goals that aren’t well translated for the IT department — so employees are unclear if they’re making progress toward those goals, and in some cases may not even know how to do so.

“Managers have dozens of these things to do, and they’re rushing. It’s more likely that unconscious biases and stereotypes will overwhelm the evaluation,” says Bruce Barge, a partner in the talent business at HR consulting firm Mercer.

Here’s a look at what makes a good performance assessment, how a new wave of data collection methods is changing the process, and what employees can do to chart a course to a great review.

[ Further reading: How to thrive in the coming tech gig economy ]

Bell-curve busters

One of the most commonly used assessment methods is forced distribution, where the company mandates a “bell curve” for performance ratings. In such a system, only 5% to 10% of employees would get a top rating of 5 on a 1-5 scale, for example, while 50% to 70% of their co-workers would get a “meets expectations” rating of 3.

At the height of forced distribution’s popularity, “probably half of companies” used it formally and “perhaps three-quarters” used it informally, Barge says.

But many employers have found that forced distribution has negative side effects, and 10% to 15% of companies that once used bell curves have eliminated them, including GE, Accenture, Netflix and Microsoft, he says.

“Everybody hates it,” Barge says. “People weren’t working well in teams or sharing code with each other. Everyone was trying to optimize their own personal success because they knew they were in this zero-sum game.”

Research firm Bersin by Deloitte reports that 51 large companies were moving to a no-ratings system as of September, while about 70% of companies are reconsidering their performance management strategies.

Computerworld

Brian Goodack remembers the forced distribution process as “sort of a joke” when he was a senior manager in software development at an electric utility.

“The initial spreadsheet would have [the IT employees] graded higher than we could fit in a bell curve. So we would go through and say, ‘Is this person really exceptional? I had this encounter with him in a stairwell once and he wasn’t exceptional.’ So to meet the bell curve, we’d drop them down to outstanding,” Goodack recalls. “It became an almost ‘who you know’ thing to get performance increases, which is never good.” At his new company, Fast Enterprises, where he serves as principal consultant, Goodack provides continuous feedback and there’s no forced distribution.

Many companies that have eliminated forced rankings are taking the time that managers had spent filling out ranking forms and sitting in calibration meetings and using it to provide more useful feedback to employees. But that still causes some debate in HR departments, because most HR information systems require some kind of quantitative entry, Barge says. Without a number or ranking, “you could be reducing the transparency of the decision” to award a promotion or increase salary.

Powerful peer reviews

Peer reviews have become a popular assessment method, particularly now that many IT employees are working on multiple teams in various business units.

One method, the 360-degree review, gathers information from an individual’s boss, peers and subordinates in a format that might include 50 questions on eight leadership competencies. “Your boss may feel that you think more strategically, for instance, than your subordinates do,” Barge says. “It identifies gaps and where to improve.”

At Symantec, peer reviews are a successful assessment technique, along with informal semiannual reviews, says Wei Lin, senior director of engineering, e-business. That 360-degree feedback “is really helpful and really powerful because we collect feedback from various levels,” she says. (To hear more from Lin on Symantec’s assessment process, check out this video, which is also featured above.)

The downside is that 360-degree surveys require a lot of time to identify peers, administer the survey and analyze the results, Barge adds.

Crowdsourced reviews

Feedback is the holy grail of employee engagement, according to HR professionals. And a slew of new technologies make peer reviews and continuous manager feedback faster and easier.

Dozens of vendors, including TMBC, Reflektive, Impraise, Engagedly, Workday and SuccessFactors, are embedding ongoing feedback tools into their performance management systems. An individual’s manager or peers can tap on an app and provide instant reviews after a meeting, presentation or project. The feedback can go directly to the HR information system alongside other feedback that the manager can review at assessment time.

On some apps, companies are using a simple set of questions that can be answered in a minute or two, such as, “If you were to work on this project again, would you want this person on the team?” or “If you owned the company, what percentage of the money budgeted for bonuses would you allot for this person’s bonus?”

Self assessment or sales pitch?

One-third of companies use employee self-assessments in the review process, according to Barge. “I think it is a good practice, but it only works well if there is ongoing feedback between the manager and the employee,” he says. It can backfire when employees think they’re having great years but their managers don’t, and they haven’t been communicating throughout the year about perceived gaps. Then, Barge says, “the manager shatters their illusions, and everybody is unhappy.”

“There are going to be more and different kinds of lenses on performance that are going to come from more and different kinds of people — customers, colleagues, not just your manager’s opinion,” Barge says. “Technology systems will help aggregate that, but it will be up to the employee and the manager to make sense of all of that data.”

Some employees think self-assessments require salesmanship skills that IT workers just don’t possess. “Anytime somebody has to sell themselves for an assessment, it’s not necessarily fair and objective,” Raloff says. “Somebody who’s better at selling themselves may get a higher ranking even if they did the same level of job.”

Clear goals are key

Managers agree that employees can’t set a course for success if they can’t see the finish line. “We need to set a clear goal at the beginning,” says Lin, who has 85 direct reports at Symantec.

Next, managers need to update employees on their progress toward those goals more than once a year. “Semiannual, informal performance reviews give managers a chance to talk with employees [about] how you view them and how they see themselves,” Lin says. “[The meetings] give everyone an opportunity to correct their course, to make sure everyone has a chance to perform at the highest level of their capability.”

[ Further reading: IT Resume Makeover: How to inject some personality ]

Cisco has also moved away from once-a-year performance reviews, which sometimes (but not always) included career conversations. Now employees and managers have quarterly “sync ups.”

“In a ‘sync up’ we talk about career paths, we talk about interests and desires and ambitions, as well as ‘How am I doing in my current role?'” says Liz Centoni, an engineering vice president and a 15-year Cisco veteran in her fifth role at the company. “You’re operationalizing [the review] as part of what you do every day.”

Goodack agrees. He knew he needed more than twice-a-year meetings at Fast Enterprises to discuss employees’ goals and expectations. “For me, it was more about daily check-ins, asking what the people on the team actually want to do and build, and improve on those interests through job training or interesting projects, or being frank about what they could do better.”

In Computerworld‘s survey, 78% of respondents said education has been important or very important to their career advancement.

“If you focus on giving them challenging problems to solve, that’s what they’re really good at. Finding out about their interests and getting more free-form feedback is important,” not simply checking the box, Goodack says. “I don’t think you can ever be successful with IT people with the old approach.”

How to get a good review

Whatever type of performance assessment process your company uses, there are several steps you can take to chart a course to a positive review.

1. Don’t wait until the end of the year. Seek feedback now. “One of the most important things in getting a good performance review is to have ongoing dialogue with your manager about what your goals are, how you’re doing against those goals and how to improve,” Barge says.

2. Document your accomplishments. “If you can write [about your achievements] with some specific details — dates, outcomes or benefits to the business — and share it with your manager in advance of the performance review — preferably a couple of weeks — then your chances of a getting a fair review are really improved,” Barge says.

3. Don’t think of a performance review as an adversarial conversation. “If you want it to be productive, you have to think of it as a relationship conversation,” Barge says. “You can hurt yourself if you make the conversation too emotion-based instead of fact- or relation-based.”

The relationship between the employee and the manager is the single best predictor of engagement. It’s one of those things you just can’t automate.

“We are human beings,” Barge says. “The way you connect an employee to the purpose of the organization, the way you help them progress in their career, the way you focus their efforts so they can have a good year, that’s all based on relationships.”