I recently read Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock, Google’s head of People Operations.
With some recent articles questioning the performance rating system (bell-curve) in companies, I wanted to know how Google – a new-age and wildly successful company – appraised its employees.
Google continues to top the charts in ‘Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work for’ based on employee feedback. So it is worthwhile to see what they are they doing well.
On appraisal, as I understand from reading the book Work Rules!
1. Google continues to have a rating system, on the lines of 1 – 5.
They categorize it as :
– Needs Improvement
– Consistently Meets Expectations
– Exceeds Expectations
– Strongly Exceeds Expectations, and
– Superb
2. Google however has done away with in-between decimal slabs – such as 3.1, 3.7, 3.8, 4.1, etc. – as that led to a lot of heartburn, and unproductive discussions.
(I recall this decimal feature being there in one of the companies I worked for – and true, it made the distinction between 3 and 4 hazy, and devoid of impact.)
3. The appraisal is now on half-yearly basis, instead of the (earlier) quarterly basis. This has helped Google to save many man-hours, in view of their exhaustive appraisal process (see point 4 below).
4. More importantly, the appraisal, while starting from line-manager’s feedback, becomes final only after ‘calibration’. Group of managers sit together and review their employees’ draft ratings, to remove bias, etc. (The author, Laszlo Bock, spends considerable efforts explaining the process and benefits of calibration.)
5. Employees working in engineering or product management can nominate themselves for promotion.
6. In some well-defined scenarios – an employee, on denied promotion, has the option to appeal to a committee. If still not convinced, he or she has the option to approach an appeal-of-appeals committee.
7. In rewards and compensation, Google believes in paying handsomely for exceptional people. It believes in the Power Law distribution. (One great engineer is worth three or five engineers.)
No wonder, in the Great Place to Work question – ‘Management is honest and ethical in its business practices’ – 95% of Googlers (as Google employees call themselves) said Yes.
Now to the point of this article:
1. Chances are your company isn’t as open (or open to experimentation) as Google in its employee practices. Or your specific line-manager doesn’t inspire confidence in how he has appraised you the way he has.
You consequently are low on motivation and don’t have much faith in the appraisal process.
2. Secondly, even in a company like Google – as Bock informs – despite their best efforts at transparency, some employees continue to have misgivings about the appraisal process. Typical misgivings are:
a. A got promoted whereas B did not, possibly because A works for the CFO. So better to work on a project headed by a senior person.
b. I see engineers in the Android (mobile device) team getting promoted whereas those in Infrastructure (data center) weren’t. So better to work on user-facing / in-vogue stuff.
c. My chances of promotion are more if I work in Google headquarters in the USA, instead of a regional office.
3. Thirdly, in any company – other than Sales (with its month-on-month targets), all other jobs – Operations, Service, IT – have a high degree of subjectivity to it. You see your glass half-full, your boss sees it half-empty.
In view of the above, what should you do – as an Individual – to reduce your chances of an unfair appraisal?
What more can you do – apart from good work – to ensure you are appraised fairly, commensurate with the work you have done?
I have a suggestion.
I invite you to read Chapter 19 in the book 21 Office Situations & How to Deal with Them.
In it, I talk about a simple but powerful exercise I adopted years ago that both improved my effectiveness and efficiency at work. It also provided me with the ammunition I needed to argue my case come appraisal time.
Implementing the said email won’t take more than 2 hours of your time, each month.
As I write in that chapter, I stumbled upon it at time of a crisis. And I will always have this regret, if only someone had suggested it to me when I was starting out.
I hope you will find the suggestion worthwhile and benefit from it.
(It is February now. You can implement it from March, so that when December 2016 comes, you are more than ready for your annual sit-down with boss.)
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Anil Karamchandani is a Mumbai-based former manager.
He is author of ’21 Office Situations & How to Deal with Them’ available on Amazon.in