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.