Stop Start Performance Management
No, really, just stop
It has come to my attention that this month is interim performance appraisal month. I became aware of it when I received an invitation to my interim performance appraisal meeting. We all know your rating was already decided weeks ago, after you finished some random task or said something irrelevant in a meeting that either made your boss think you’re the company champion or the fifth floor’s village idiot.
But of course, just deciding on an employee’s rating would be terribly unfair. More efficient and perhaps more honest, but supposedly very unfair. So it’s important to gather subjective, immaterial and uncorrelated supporting evidence in order to justify the manager’s off-the-cuff evaluation of your performance. And this week I came across a rather novel way of doing that. It’s rather obviously called “Stop, Start and Continue”
Now, “Stop, Start and Continue” could easily be mistaken for the name of Alfa Romeo’s Motorplan (it runs for the first 10,000km or three months, whichever comes first or unless the gearbox falls off, in which case the motorplan is invalidated – hey, it’s your fault for buying an Alfa), but it also happens to be a very quick and easy way of evaluating employee performance. Why send out links to expensive performance management web sites, complicated Excel spreadsheets for capturing 360 degree feedback or asking people to complete a self-evaluation (an entertaining way to see just how deluded some colleagues can be)? All you need to do is send out a brief e-mail to superiors, peers and minions of the person being evaluated and ask them to list what the person should stop doing, start doing and continue doing, all for the purpose of learning, growth and weeding out the idiots.
To save you some time and attention, I’ve listed a few choice selections of what to answer if you’re lucky enough to be asked to participate in a friendly game of “Stop, Start and Continue”.
Stop
- Asking what Jack Welch would do.
- Pressing ‘Alt’ and ‘Tab’ every time someone passes your desk; we know you’re surfing the net and the fake budget spreadsheet from 2007 isn’t fooling anyone.
- Please.
Start
- Practicing higher standards of personal hygiene; there’s a reason why no one’s inviting you meetings and it’s not because “we’ve run out of chairs again”.
- Subscribing to those online recruitment web sites… I’m not saying anything but they might come in handy after we replace you with a macro in Excel.
- Working – a novel way to earn a salary and perhaps even a bonus as opposed to whining every year that you’re underpaid and the only bonus you got was an accidental extra helping of bolognaise at the canteen!
Continue
- Coming to work earlier and earlier and leaving later and later till you eventually leave before you arrive. We will interpret this as commitment, but will mark you down for having poor work/life balance
- Falling asleep at your desk. We all have a good laugh when you deny it, even though we can see the impression your keyboard has made on your cheeks. Also, it’s a mousepad, not a droolpad.
- Bringing donuts to Monday’s weekly progress meeting in a vain attempt to curry favour, when we all know you haven’t done anything since last week’s progress meeting you work-shy lazy bastard
