Alas, poor Yorick! Taken from Wikipedia, David Tennant using Alexander Tchiakowsky's skull. Gross. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yorick
I responded to a Quora question today. The question was "How should startups handle performance reviews? Not just performance reviews, but compensation adjustments, promotions, etc. to help invest and develop employees. How can this be handled optimally assuming the management team believes this is important and worthwhile, while not adding unnecessary process or overhead?"
I noticed several people recommended rypple.com as a useful tool. I am going to check it out, although everyone who recommended it probably works there. No, I am not cynical, just...pragmatic.
There are many tools that can be used (of course, there's also paper and pencil), but what it comes down to is common sense. You shouldn't need an army of HR people to make sure managers are talking to their people, giving feedback and setting expectations.
Get the leaders of the organization together twice a year to talk about the company's talent. During these meetings, they can agree upon comp adjustments, promotions, and the performance of individuals. They can then take that feedback back to the employees and share it, good bad or indifferent.
Do you need to memorialize it all? Ideally, sure. But, as long as you get the key items down...pay changes, title changes, and maybe a few bullets on goals or feedback, that's fine. We all have a tendency to overengineer this stuff.
As an employee, what can you do about an annoyingly overengineered review process? You have to play the game to some degree. If they want a self review, write one. But, there's no need to write war and peace. In the words of...someone...Shakespeare? Brevity is the soul of wit! And business. Not that I would know.
Quora link here: http://www.quora.com/How-should-startups-handle-performance-reviews
tracy c
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