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I just need to formulate my Personal Goals that will help us to meet the Hub Goals for the year (not department, you understand, hub), which all align to the corporate Strategic Drivers. And, of course, I need to come up with a Development Goal that will allow me to Be My Best Self. Then all I need to do is load them in PeopleCloud
Shoot. Me. Now. Or, alternatively, as my employer, just f___g tell me what you want me to do. As I expressed to the other guy I work with, imagine getting a plumber in and asking "So, Dave, what are you hoping to achieve with this bathroom refit?"
When faced with such horrors at work I recommend this tool to my team. As line manager I apporve them too
Nearly a quarter of the year has already passed.
My Great Hub of Peopleness has one goal entered for me. "Evidence your contribution on the business unit success. Make a tangible contribution to all performance objectives to include:
Description: Against Orders, Revenue and Entity Contribution: 28.7%"
I work in the IT department.
Are you not worried about how your role contributes to the success of the organisation?
Do you not care about how you can develop and improve to become better? Even plumbers must develop and learn new stuff!
db (HR Manager ;-))
My current department manager has a thankfully quite relaxed view of these things.
My previous manager was the pointy haired one from Dilbert. I once got hauled in for a telling off for scoring myself 7 out of 7* for Integrity as according to their own definitions you could only ever achieve the standard, or fall short. They demoted me to 4/7, meets expectations and I still maintain that if meets expectations and the highest level of integrity aren't synonymous then that explains the great big chonkin SFO fine we're paying off.
*lets leave aside the question of what sociopath creates a scoring system 1-7, of which 1,2,6 and 7 were only theoretically achievable if you were in the wrong job or had been fired mid year.
@db - one of my favourite quotes was from someone in the Business School at a Russell Group Uni who said that "HR has industrialised the art of being unhelpful". Nobody in the room disagreed with them.
🙃
Are you not worried about how your role contributes to the success of the organisation?
Is it not the organisation's role to work that out, not mine?
Do you not care about how you can develop and improve to become better?
Honestly? Not really. I'm quite happy to just crack on with whatever I've been asked to do, a bit like plumbers
Genuine question though - is there any evidence that this approach actually improves organisational performance?
Christ on a shitty stick.... ^ She (Siobhan) is properly irritating. Which is, like, the whole point, OK, right?
@thelawman - I have genuinelly worked with people like Siobhan, which is why I love W1A. They absolutely nailed it.
They walk among us.
So glad I'm retired! Was always a load of crap when I was working. Many years ago I was trying to do a review with someone reporting to me and a sign appeared in the office window saying "sack the ****" 😀
Nearly a quarter of the year has already passed.
And end of year reviews start in September to have everything signed off by mid-November.
Happens everywhere, and it's how it works in big organisations. You don't want training, promotions etc? Or you're just happy with whatever till they find someone cheaper and more ambitious and park you in a corner?
Or you’re just happy with whatever till they find someone cheaper and more ambitious and park you in a corner?
Yes.
As no one else has come up with any decent suggestions try these:
my goals for this year are;
1. Get in a fight
2. Invent a new sandwich filling
3. Get you bozos to give me more money for doing **** all
Dunno, 2. might be tricky. Haven't we already reached peak sandwich with the mighty ham, cheese, mayo, salad, pepper and cheese sandwich?
If you think that is controversial, you could fill 1. right now...
I was supposed to do this every year Never once was the process completed.
IMO a completely useless waste of time.
When I used to work for Nortel (90,000 staff) we had all that drivel every year.
Only ever worked for startups since and it's just so much simpler, the only process is: people who don't fit in or pull their weight get made redundant. Everyone else just carries on working....
Every single person in a company having to waste time doing this bollox is one of the contributors to the UK having such a shit low level of productivity.
I had mine today. By the time it's complete I'll have staffed away the best part of a day of time. And my bos will have had to do this bollox x10 with the rest of the team. (He thinks it's ****y time wasting too, but will get a kicking and wasted even more time defending it if he doesnt).
After 30 years in my industry and work for paying customers coming out of my ears all the time (work that comes direct to me from the customers most of the time) mine could be be summed up in 4 words. "Well done. Carry On".
I was reminded I had to "submit my Q1 Priorities before COP" yesterday.
Having already discussed that my workload is 100% dictated to me by my line manager (as my line manager's is to her), I wrote:
P1 - do the tasks assigned throughout Q1
P2 - do the additional tasks assigned throughout Q1 that meet the requirements of P1
P3 - complete any ad-hoc tasks that time allows for considering P1 & P2
Email alert received this morning to say my Priorities were agreed...my LM is not a detail oriented person.
One job i had i had 40 staff reporting to me. New starts had appraisals and target setting at 3 months and then tbe end of the year. Other staff annually. Policy said i shouls take two hours for each in prep time, doing the nonsense and debrief. Works out at nearly 3 weeks of my time or 5% of my working year. I told my boss i would start doing them after i got mine. I never got one. Never did one
Genuine question though – is there any evidence that this approach actually improves organisational performance?
Yes, if it's done well. Too many organisation don't do in well and focus too much on the tooling and process rather than the conversation.
However its like bikes and helmets, lots of arguments for and against. Like any tool it can be used the wrong way. However in large organisations it helps understand who are the solid performers, who are the people to invest in and who might be under performing and need more support.
Then there is the whole topic of if you should link Reward to Performance. Better performance = More compensation. Even more arguements for and against this but the idea is that for most employees (private sector) money incentivises them to hit their target. If the right targets are set and aligned with the organisations objectives linking them to an individuals salary/bonus should improve the overall performance of the organisation.
I could go on but fear most of you are already falling asleep. 🙂
Just photo copy last year's bs and slap it down
Yes, if it’s done well.
But it never is, as the air gap between the aspirational meaningless twaddle touted by major corps as “strategy” and doing something actually practically useful in your particular field is so vast you could steer a malfunctioning container ship through it with room to spare
Previous job in, in an company of under 15 of us, my apraisal was: "you get on with your job don't you yes good."
Currently, still in a small company, but relatively larger company, I think still under 100 employees but not sure. Often wear jeans and t-shirt, and when it gets warmer definitely will be in shorts and t-shirt.
From the sounds of it I'm very glad I don't work in a big corporation, not sure I could get used to it, the culture, wearing a suit.... shudders.
When I worked for one of the big 4 consulting firms, my boss and I had an agreement. He'd just roll over last years nonsense and I'd not turn up for my appraisal in a chicken suit 🙂 4 years, nobody noticed but sadly never got to out the chicken suit 🙂
All our stuff was client facing. If we screwed up we were done with all the due process a partner led/revenue is king company cares about, if we did okay then we got left alone. Any objective setting seemed largely irrelevant as we were just cash cows for the partners.
I don't miss it 😉
@db It would be nice if these development plans could be couched in plain English rather than corporate babble. I was involved many years ago in setting up QA as a director in a small company followed by Investors in People, both of which we found very useful. The IIP stuff was very simple and allowed that not everyone wanted to make huge personal advances or massive contributions to the business. They simply wanted to do their job well and be rewarded for it. Appraisal was as much about them as the business. My later experience in large corporations tended to colour my view that appraisals had become more stick than carrot.
who might be under performing and need more support.
Told to pull their socks up and put on an improvement plan.
I think the rot set in a long, long time ago when "Personnel" was rebranded as "Human Resources".
These two would probably do
[b]formulate my Personal Goals that will help us to meet the Hub Goals [/b]
My personal goals will be to remain productive and fully utilise my capacity to deliver against the hub goals assigned whilst ensuring they align to the corporate Strategic Drivers
[b]Development Goal that will allow me to Be My Best Self.[/b]
I aim to achieve a better work life balance that will both optimise my work performance whilst remaining mentally focussed and happy.
They walk among us.
Sadly, often on their hind legs, which makes them more difficult to identify. Until they start attempting to communicate, which is a task they clearly have difficulty doing.
Dunno, 2. might be tricky. Haven’t we already reached peak sandwich with the mighty ham, cheese, mayo, salad, pepper and cheese sandwich?
Many moons ago I was in a sandwich shop when a bloke walked in and asked for "ham, jam, onion and mustard". It was made up for him without even a slightly raised eyebrow. I have yet to try this delicacy.
I’ve had PDR plans to fill in for the last five years. I’ve simply changed the dates and slightly reworded them. Told the people who work under me to do the same. Nobody has ever noticed or questioned it. The whole process of these things is a tedious, pointless slog and doesn’t work. Funny how the only person on the thread supporting them in any way works in HR.
I left my previous long time employer after a total clusterfhluck of a reverse takeover of the previously sucessful division I was in (how much utter incompetence or even willful damage is accepted at high levels within major international companies, is beyond belief).
Anyway...they decided that all us workers having to do a (I paraphrase as I can't recall the precise bollox) " Personal health and safety pledge" and put it on our desk ( when we had desks before the office space cost reduction 'agile working' was rolled out to make staff feel doubly unwelcome).
I did one that said I committed to more swimming, biking and even running in order to get back to a level of fitness suitable for another ironman. With small images of me swimming / biking / running included.
None of the senior mismanagers ever came close enough to us profit making engineers to notice. But little victories and all that.
I don’t work in HR, but they’ve been productive for me at my current work. Last time I expressed an interest in people management, so the company has started me on management training courses, which I can use to apply for management roles, leading to a decent pay increase, should I want to.
Maybe they ‘don’t work’ because people convince themselves that they don’t work before trying to make them work.
formulate my Personal Goals that will help us to meet the Hub Goals for the year (not department, you understand, hub), which all align to the corporate Strategic Come up with a Development Goal that will allow me to Be My Best Self.
Can't chatGPT or whatever it's called help with this crap?
My other moan whilst on about it was the HR eeejits decided to apply a 'normal'* distribution to the permitted scoring system - so irrespective of whether all team members were doing well, there had to be a distribution of good / average / bad / ugly scorings. .and that reflected on pay (+ redundancies when the time came after the business was ruined).
(* They didn't actually understand the difference between a 'normal' distribution and binomial. Duurh.)
I was in an industry-leading team that had grown with careful selective recruitment (managed by ourselves) of the best around over 2 decades. There was no dead wood or dross - we'd made sure of that at the recruitment stage over the years.
Try explaining how a (binomial) distribution is mathematically total bollox when the formation of the team was not randomly selected from the populous at large, but was already skewed towards the best in the business. Or, as I put it to the eeejits who rolled it out from HR, "we need to go recruit a bunch of fhuckwhits, morons and idiots to balance out the team to make your scoring system valid".
Thank **** I'm out of there. Many of the other good folks are out too.
Led by donkeys.
Just photo copy last year’s bs and slap it down
Pretty much the arrangement I have. It's nice we get to have an hours chat and coffee on work time.
Maybe they ‘don’t work’ because people convince themselves that they don’t work before trying to make them work
Or the other way round? Confirmation bias?
Ours are terrible this year.
The 'questions' are paragraph long word salads and we're expected to score ourselves on a scale of 'frowny face' though to 'happy face' with space for comments below.
First question basically asks you to score yourself on 4 criteria at once, at least one of which is entirely unrelated to the other three 😭
I think it's a job for the train journey in. Will toss a coin to decide how committed I am to staying then apply myself appropriately 😂
"Many moons ago I was in a sandwich shop when a bloke walked in and asked for “ham, jam, onion and mustard”. It was made up for him without even a slightly raised eyebrow. I have yet to try this delicacy."
My mum used to have a stock response to "what's for dinner": ham, lamb, liver and jam and toura loura lay. No idea where it came from.
However in large organisations it helps understand who are the solid performers, who are the people to invest in and who might be under performing and need more support.
I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. The only people interested in this is HR. If leadership do not understand the strengths and weaknesses of their teams, and likewise line managers for their employees then they are not doing their job. This knowledge comes from day-to-day interactions and delivering the job, not a contrived box ticking exercise using some bloated 3rd party software. It is and always has been a huge waste of time.
I’m a senior director in a large multinational. I play the game, but only because I have a bonus hanging off a financial target. I therefore have a single objective in the system, purely for HR’s benefit. It certainly doesn’t help me, my line manager, or my teams. It doesn't help the company either. I’m not even sure why HR are involved, they are a function and the bonus comes from my own P&L account!
Turns out Nightshift wasn't that bad as they have still to set it up.
Maybe tonight or maybe not
It usually goes something like
Jan: “HR say you need to set some objectives for the year"
Mar: objectives hastily cobbled together and submitted just before HRs deadline
May: Something major happens, projects get cancelled, new projects started, someone leaves or you take on new responsibilities
Nov: Annual review time - those objectives you set at the start of the year are now largely irrelevant because you actually did what was needed after the big thing that changed in May.
So all the HR form ticking is pretty pointless, but then they figure that you should do the whole thing quarterly so you get to waste 4 times as much effort. What actually works is simple, timely conversations between line manager and employee so both can raise any issues or discuss ambitions, but that doesn't keep HR happy and certainly doesn't pay the bills of the external consultancies who come up with these ridiculous systems in the first place.
Yes, if it’s done well. Too many organisation don’t do in well and focus too much on the tooling and process rather than the conversation.
To be honest I'm sure that the theory is sound and, if it's done well, it works. But in my thirty year experience in Corporateland it never is. If a major corporate had any other process that involved every single member of staff for a significant amount of time that had no measurable benefit, they'd get rid of it or, at least, massively simplify it, but this just seems to be a massive blindspot.
It would be nice if these development plans could be couched in plain English rather than corporate babble.
I worked for a major 'content creation' company that insisted on using a 'fishbone' diagram(atic?) as the basis for annual assessments/goal-setting. It completely mystified me every time. I'm a words person - guess what, lots of writers are - and I just couldn't connect with it. Even thinking about it now brings on this mental mist of utter bafflement.
I think the idea was that it side-stepped 'corporate babble' in favour of more, erm, accessible visual frameworks. I'm sure it worked brilliantly for illustrators, cartoonists, high-functioning cats and HR people with a goal to 'simplify' annual assessments, but for me it was spectacularly worse than useless. I blame it for my singular failure to create, pursue or achieve anything for around a decade.
Fishbones kids, just say no!
Just photo copy last year’s bs and slap it down
When I started this job four years ago I got a job spec. Every year since I've just copied and pasted the items from that into whatever seems the most appropriate box on whatever that years Goals/Objectives/Targets/Whatevereitscalledthisyear template was. Seems to work. Adds no value, obviously, but that's clearly not the point.
I spent a few years as a contractor and the absolute best thing about that was not having to do this nonsense. I can put up with no pension, no sick pay, no paid holidays, no real job security, all for the inner bliss that comes from never having to fill in a f____g appraisal form.
We have a reporting system that plays no part whatsoever in promotion processes, allocating training, pay, lateral moves and transfer processes or career development. Management recognise all of this but every year they thump on about the importance of it and chuck in mandatory objectives which have nothing to do with core business. We also have a nine box grid system on one’s role and aspirations which is done as well as the report. This also has no bearing on any development processes.
The whole thing is HR seeing what other organisations do and thinking they should do the same without actually ensuring there’s a benefit to do this; monkey see, monkey do.
Looks like I'm lucky then - mine gets used for all the above.
If what we're doing is completely unplanned we just edit it mid year to reflect what we really need to get done.
Plumbers got brought up a couple of times by the OP.
I'm a tradesman and I do sort of set myself targets. 'Get more efficient at x,' 'Get better with this tool'. Even just 'get faster'. If I turn up at a job and see the chance to try something I want to practice, I do. Every tradie I know does the same. So contrary to the idea that we just rock up and work, I wonder if there's more incentive to set targets, albeit informally, when you're self-employed and your income is directly affected by any improvements you can make.
Caveat - I've never worked in a big business. From the sounds of it, this could all be absolute bobbins there.
We also have a nine box grid system
We had one of these many years ago, one axis was 'Potential', one was 'Delivery'. Theory being, a new starter might be lin Box 1, low on delivery but high on potential, an old lag might be Box 3, high on delivery but low on potential as they churned through stuff well but had got as far as they could, or wanted, to go. High flyers might be Box 9.
Unfortunately, pretty much everyone got plumped in the middle box, Box 5. So, to overcome this, they put a nine box grid within that box...
an old lag might be Box 3, high on delivery but low on potential as they churned through stuff well but had got as far as they could, or wanted, to go.
You called? I am expert in role but with no desire to move or be promoted, so bottom left corner of the grid, alongside all my peers. It’s a bit pointless because no one looks at the results, maps them to any other data or bases any planning on them.
So contrary to the idea that we just rock up and work,
Yeah, fair enough, I get that, it wasn't my intention to imply that tradies are just drones doing exactly what they're told. My point is more that the customer (i.e. employer) will tell you pretty specifically what they want you to do (fit a bath there, fix that tap etc) and then it's up to you to use your skill, knowledge etc to achieve that aim, and there's obviously benefit in in increasing those skills.
What they don't do is present you with a pretty high level list of the things that that they want to achieve in the coming year, and ask you to explain what you are going to do, as a plumber, to help them achieve those things. And I guarantee "fix that drippy tap in the bathroom" will not be on that list, at best you might have something like "enhance the household living experience".
I'd love to see what the evidence base is for formal performance appraisals. And I mean evidence across wide range of public and private sector organisations. Every positive take I see seems to be a) anecdotal b) from a HR professional and c) related to a specific company or more often, a specific part of a company. I bet if you did a survey of 1000 random companies and a representative sample of staff form those companies (reflecting across the seniority levels) I reckon that the vast majority of people would consider it a total waste of time and resources. Staff hate doing it, line managers hate doing it.
High performing teams emerge where there is a great working culture in the organisation. It's not improved or enhanced through some meaningless box-ticking nonsense.
I hated goal setting!
Now that I no longer work my first goal of the day is breakfast then take it from there.
I’ve just left a big corporate machine that focused heavily on the goal setting / appraisal system to determine your future career goals. The last proper appraisal I had was in 2015, which was the year I had 5 months off due to my spine being rebuilt. Since then I’ve not bothered, when asked why I’ve stated that when I get a some guidance and feedback from my manager then I’ll do the same for my team.
My team and I all had annual salary increases due to our exceptional performance. So someone somewhere was filling in the forms.
In my prior employment I loved the goal setting. We had 5 goals, 2 aligned with our manager and therefore team outcomes, and 3 individual. I’m logically driven so on days of doubt / boredom it was easy to open up my Goals HR page and remind myself to find something aligned with one of the 5 to do.
I hate this stuff.
New goal setting scheme for us this year that is all based on line management alignment. Except we're a scrum team, and obviously have a matrixed arrangement to what we do and how we do it, none of which comes from line management.
Sigh.
I’m logically driven but that means I’m also able to recognise non-value adding admin, when it arises!
Had my goal setting session this morning: 1 was already decreed by the company (do some Ethics & Compliance training that has absolutely no relevance to my job but a couple of bigwigs got done for bribery a few years ago so now everyone has to suffer). The other 4 I randomly selected from my objectives over the last 5 years and reworded them slightly.
Utter waste of time but it keeps senior management happy and gives HR something to do.
Working somewhere that doesn't do any of this at all can make you realise the value of the process in places who can do it well (ie w/o the Brent-isms or box-tick-done approaches).
I see it as a pretty good indicator of the overall direction. Also linked to clarity of brand, though that's not relevant to a lot of companies or roles.
is there any evidence that this approach actually improves organisational performance?
Possibly - not 100% on topic but this was something similar I was reading about recently,
Firms with clearly communicated, widely understood, and collectively shared mission and vision have been shown to perform better than those without them, with the caveat that they related to effectiveness only when strategy and goals and objectives were aligned with them as well (Bart, et. al., 2001).
- it's related to branding as well as goals but I'm tempted to say a company who prioritise 'mission' clarity will understand communication well overall so goal-setting is then relevant ('SMART' objectives? ha.. and I may laugh but I can remember what it means so .. ).
This study's findings probably relate to the general level of management communication in a company. If you can communicate what you're doing and work out how it's to be done you'll probably get a better result?
I've always found pay rises have to be argued from all angles. If you're not shouting through every channel you have available to you, you're giving them an opportunity not to listen. If written in the correct way to benefit you, performance goals give objective evidence that is harder to argue against than claiming you could be paid more elsewhere etc
Q- how are you going to motivate yourself to excel over the coming year?
A ,- ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Manager - you have to change that it's not acceptable.
Me - it's my goal. You can't set it for me. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
It's this time of year where i just lose all care for this stuff, process for the sake of process, same with the mandatory training i have, it's all tick box exercises for those higher up to say they've completed their duty of care and workplace requirements, this year they added a couple more training courses online to really demotivate us more, at the same time as they're trying to 'streamline' the workforce and increase productivity and efficiency, i am just awaiting the 'cheaper, faster, better' banners to be dusted off and brought back again 🤣
This got a bit tedious at my previous employer as the goals were generally the same as the previous year but with the added caveat of it needing the management to actually support/fund/train it if they want it to happen. Seemed to expect mountains to be made from a cup of dust.
Just an annual rant with the line manager about how detached and useless the middle management were. As much for them as me.