Reviews

In an effort to keep salaries down, most companies perform official reviews of their employees. These reviews may come each quarter, twice a year, or annually, but no matter where you work there's a good chance you will be reviewed. So how does this affect employee morale? Let's take a look.

Most people's raises are tied directly to their review. The better your review, the better your chance of getting a raise. If you get a poor review, you have a pretty good chance of spending your time at work searching for a new job on the internet. So it comes as no surprise that review time can be quite stressful for many people. For some people, a review can make or break their career - one bad review at the wrong time and you could wind up stuck in the same job (at the same pay) for the foreseeable future. However, a good review at the right time could propel you into a whole new world of possibilities, with doors opening before you that you wouldn't have imagined possible just a short while ago. Or at the very least, you could get a 3% raise.

So with so much riding on these reviews, it's no wonder that people spend a lot of time worrying about them. What will your boss say about you? About the quality of work you do? Will your boss say you are a "hard worker" or are there "opportunities for improvement?" Are you a "model employee whose characteristics are such that all other employees should strive to be like you" or are you "a devious, lazy sloth who has, on no fewer than three occasions, been caught stealing office supplies?" By the way, that last one will probably get you no more than a 1% raise, so try to not be that one.

Sometimes, in order to crank up the tension, companies will include peer evaluations as part of the review process. That's right, your co-workers opinions will have a direct impact on how much of a raise (if any) you get. On the surface, this may not sound all that bad, especially if you are friends with the people you work with. But dig a little deeper, and you'll see why this could be a disaster.

First of all, this would only be a benefit to you if you get to pick the people who do the review. If you get to pick your close friends, and reach a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" agreement, this is not a problem. However, if your manager gets to pick the reviewers, there's a decent chance that your manager will pick people who are not your friend and will be more objective. Worse case scenario, your manager (maybe knowingly, maybe not) picks someone that doesn't like you, or has an axe to grind with you. Suddenly, you're forced to either kiss up to this person, or accept the fact that your review will be filled with comments like "Needs to improve: personal hygiene." Your only hope is that you are selected to review this person as well, resulting in a stalemate. Remember "MAD" from the Cold War? Mutually Assured Destruction. It's what kept the USA and USSR from launching nukes at each other. The same principle will keep you and your co-worker from lobbing bombs at each other in your reviews.

Some companies take the torture one step further. As part of the evaluation process, you have to evaluate yourself. While this may seem like a slam dunk in your favor, it isn't necessarily the blessing it appears to be.

While you do have the opportunity to lavish ridiculous amounts of undeserved praise upon yourself, keep in mind that this portion of review will be taken with a boulder-sized grain of salt. As foolish as we like to think management is, management is smart enough to know that you're going to pat yourself on the back a little more than anyone else would. While saying that you "saved the company $1.4 million dollars while simultaneously streamlining the work process of your entire division" may sound good, there's a decent chance that your manager will at least question you about it. On the bright side, no manager expects you to be completely honest, so you can get away with one or two white lies, like "consistently shows up on time" and "is willing to help others with their work whenever possible."

The biggest downside to the self-evaluation is the part that asks you to describe "opportunities for improvement" - in other words, what don't you do well enough that will justify your small raise. Not only are they picking on your weak points (in the unlikely event you have any), but they're making you do it for them. Then they can come back and say that "we would've liked to have given you a bigger raise, but as you pointed out, you need to improve on..." and at that point, whatever words come next don't really matter. The key to try to avoid this pitfall is to pick things that are easy to improve on, or things that aren't important, or things you already do well (so that when your next review comes along, you can brag about how much you "improved" in this area). Examples of these might be taking better notes during meetings, working better with others, and no longer selling trade secrets to your competitors.

If you're lucky, you only have to go through this process once a year, and hopefully you're now a little better prepared to tackle your next review. Got any review advice of your own? Any review horror stories? Post a comment and share them with us.