How to Encourage Style over Substance

If done properly, a structured staff appraisal might be useful for professionals (such as in the legal or medical profession) to help them plan their career objectives for the coming year. For support staff, however, I have for a long time thought that appraisals are either completely pointless, a mixed blessing, or in some circumstances, an opportunity for bullying.

Perhaps it is the way the appraisal is structured or carried out, but I have always felt that every staff appraisal I have had has come across like a contrived exercise to throw the admin people a bone so they do not feel left out. For those staff who simply carry out the same support functions year in and year out as a “pay the bills” job, it’s not as if we have an obvious professional career progression for the company to take an interest in.

In reality, it just gives people further up the company the opportunity to make negative remarks about an employee without any fear of being taken to task about their comments, or asked to clarify ambiguous or overly-general statements. This “feedback” is anonymous, you see, and once it makes its way onto your appraisal form, even when totally in error, there it stays. Although you can give your own assessment of the situation, this is never fed back to the person who made the original comment so that he/she can see the error, or be asked to clarify exactly what was meant. No, it just sits on your personnel file for all perpetuity, unless you wish to go through formal complaint procedures. Whoopee.

Much like the vacuous wishlists seen in advertisements or job specifications for office support positions, the support staff appraisal form has all of the empty buzz phrases: “energetic and enthusiastic”, “flexible and proactive approach”, “positive relationships with clients and colleagues”.

Come on, if I were going to quantify or statisticize those things objectively, how would I do it? How is a member of staff supposed to evaluate his/her own performance against such a list?

I’m sorry to say that I simply gave up trying, and asked my partner to help me.

After the self-assessment form has been completed, and the anonymous “feedback” has been obtained from the staff member’s seniors and typed into a separate form, what happens next is that a manager takes the staff member into a meeting room and the two forms are compared. Inevitably, where there is a discrepancy between the two, the manager rules in favour of the seniors’ comments and the box marked “Improvement needed” gets checked.

This happens even when an isolated mistake has been made into a generality by one of the bosses, or there has clearly been a miscommunication where some individual has gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick about some occurrence, or someone has simply made a malicious allegation where there was never a problem in the first place.

In all cases, if the employee states that he/she vehemently disagrees with something, would like to put another side to the story, or would simply like to ask for clarification or specifics to be provided, it is highly unlikely to get back to the person(s) who need to hear it. Unless, of course, the staff member goes to their seniors personally to raise specific disagreements or questions about something that was said.

Well, I work for seven people. Whom should I approach?

The highly subjective nature of many of the comments makes them very difficult to refute in a way that cannot be argued with. Of course, I can always disprove a completely off-the-wall comment about demonstrable skills and measurable outcomes. Do I have sufficient literacy, numeracy, keyboarding speed and accuracy, software competency and specific subject knowledge to do the job? Yes, and these things can be objectively tested. What about attendance and punctuality? Check the swiping in and out logs. Years of experience? My longevity in the position can easily be checked. Do I deliver what I’m supposed to deliver instead of hanging around chatting all day and getting in colleagues’ hair? You can bet it would quickly be noticed if I were missing deadlines.

But no, these things are never the bone of contention. Instead, they want to nitpick about personal attributes that can be defined any way you care to define them, such as “attitude” and “interpersonal skills”, and these have been blown up, at least on the appraisal form, into at least 90% of what the role is all about, instead of the “hard skills”.

Yet when those “hard skills” are missing, the same people are the first to moan. I’ve been to companies as a temporary member of staff, where it has quickly become obvious to me that the people I am sent to work for have been messed around by a succession of useless temps before I arrived. “They sounded great on the phone!” said the boss at one company.

Having been in a position before where it was part of my role to look after temporary staff sent to the company from agencies, it seemed that whole initial impression thing was exactly the problem. These people were personable, they talked the talk, were immaculately dressed and coiffed, and their CVs looked great on paper. Their agencies probably thought they were very marketable.

Unfortunately, the quality of their work rarely if ever matched – they made silly mistakes and didn’t check their work, they were slow, they didn’t know the packages well and needed constant help. Was it any wonder, then, when I turned up and actually got the work done quickly and accurately, the bosses would start to look tremendously relieved?

(I suppose being a temp, I wasn’t there long enough for the whole personality politics thing to kick in.)

It never made sense to me how those who talk the talk inevitably get to the front of the queue before those who walk the walk. If the recruiting and interview process rewards the former, then the appraisal system definitely perpetuates it.