Performance
Performance and goals
Review cycles, goals and peer feedback — with the paperwork kept deliberately out of the way.
A review cannot be closed without a recorded conversation
Performance software fails in a specific way: it automates the paperwork so thoroughly that the paperwork becomes the point and the conversation never happens. This is the one place the product is deliberately obstructive.
Cycles
Creating a cycle generates its reviews in the same operation. A cycle with no reviews looks identical on screen to one where nobody was eligible, and the difference is whether somebody has been forgotten.
Who is included is a rule, not a picker: anybody engaged during the period, contractors excluded, leavers included. Letting somebody hand-pick would turn *was this person reviewed?* into a question about who remembered. Somebody who left during the period is still reviewed — there is a period to assess and a conversation owed.
What is visible to whom
- A manager's assessment is invisible to its subject until submitted, and is excluded from the query rather than hidden in the page. A half-written appraisal is a manager thinking aloud, and a product that leaks drafts teaches managers to draft somewhere else.
- A self-assessment locks once the manager responds. Rewriting your account of a period after it was responded to is not a correction.
- Review status is derived, not stored. A status column drifts the first time somebody edits a row, and then the board says *waiting on the manager* for a review the manager finished last week.
Peer feedback
Anonymity is chosen when somebody is asked, and can never be changed afterwards
A promise that can be revoked once the words are written is not a promise, and one added later surprises somebody who wrote expecting to be named. Anonymity holds against the subject even when the subject is an HR administrator; HR can see the author only so abuse can be investigated. Breaking that once ends peer feedback at a company permanently.
Declining a request is recorded, not deleted. Asked and said no, and never asked, are different facts — and a manager chasing the second when it was the first presses somebody for feedback they already refused to give.
Goals
- Goals are not tied to a review cycle. They outlive review rounds, and forcing them into one is what makes goal tracking stop after the first.
- A parent goal reports both its own progress and the roll-up from its children, and never overwrites one with the other. Divergence is surfaced for a person to judge.
- Ratings exclude unrated reviews from the denominator, or half the company looks unremarkable and calibration gets argued against incompleteness.