workaday Wednesday

Right, so, annual performance reviews. For whatever reason, my workplace does these in February. Except this year, when they’ve been delayed. All that really matters to me is that this delay means any potential pay increase won’t kick in until March. (Not cool, workplace. Not cool.)

The worst part, though is that we’re being fed a line about ‘these are so important to us, we want to make sure we have enough time to come up with thoughtful comments so we’re all improving.’

No. Either somebody important in the approval process is taking a vacation at a crucial time, or the company’s trying to save money by gradually pushing back the date, but there’s no way it’s because they want to provide us with more insightful feedback on our work performance.

Performance reviews are pretty much just like how Riker made them look in Star Trek — you put them off till the last minute, then slog through them all at once with as much copy/paste from the previous year as you can get away with. So it has always been, and so it always will be; that is the reality of management.

What workplaces consistently delude themselves on is the idea that they are fooling anyone. But work history isn’t linear — half my current team of minion-level coworkers were management in other jobs. There is no fooling us about performance reviews.

In the words of Nick Fury, “It’s stuff like this that gives me trust issues.”

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.