From the very late 1990’s up until the time I retired, I worked in an office. I chose a different career path that involved sitting in front of a computer doing things with other computers and servers for the British Healthcare system: the NHS.
Throughout the whole 23 years I worked in the NHS, I’ve had to have an annual appraisal. Sometimes, they were quick. Sometimes they didn’t happen (but ostensibly did on paper!). Most of the time, they took about an hour or so.
One year, my appraisal lasted four days.
Appraisals (in general)
An appraisal. Sometimes called an Annual Performance Review, an Employee Performance Review or (in our case) an appraisal. If you don’t know what an appraisal is (and I don’t blame you if you don’t!) it’s this: a meeting with your immediate line manager, where you and your manager discuss your performance over the last year and discuss any issues, remediations or opportunities that happened over the course of the year. It gives you an opportunity for career progression, by specifying any training that you’d like to do, to point you on a desired career path.
In my case, it’s the NHS. So, of course there is a shit-ton of paperwork to be completed prior to the appraisal. The paperwork consists of having to document areas that you’ve done well (and prove it) and document areas that you’d like to improve. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was. The forms were never laid out properly and you ended up repeating yourself a few times. The appraisal paperwork sometimes changed, not always for the better. In the Hospitals Trust, where you had clinical and non-clinical staff, the same appraisal just wouldn’t do. I’m not going to be progressing my career in nursing, I work in IT!
The appraisal was “worse” if you were a manager (as I was). Not only did you have to provide technical evidence, but supervisory evidence as well. And as I was a manager, I had to do the appraisals of my staff. Lot of paperwork and a lot of time for both me and my staff.
Was it worth it?
I never saw the value of the appraisals we had. If you didn’t know how well your staff were doing, or what their career progression desires were, then in my opinion, you were a bad manager.
If the appraisal tracked your career progress over a number of years, then it would probably have been worth it. E.g. a nurse working in the hospital could progress from trainee, to qualified, to staff nurse to sister and so on. Over a number of years, that would provide evidence of your career progress and would be invaluable to use if you wanted to seek employment opportunities elsewhere.
But no, IT didn’t work with a career progression model. You were employed as a technician, service desk analyst, network engineer and that was it. Any career progression was down to you applying for any internal jobs if and when they became available, or seeking employment elsewhere. Any appraisals you did along the way had no bearing whatsoever on whether you got a job you’d applied for.
The training that you had to include in your appraisal, was hardly ever fulfilled. As the IT department had very little budget for anything much – including training unless it was included in a new project, you didn’t get any. We did our own training online and in our own time, usually.
The year before I transferred over to another NHS Trust from the hospital, we discovered (by accident) that no-one else in the hospital did appraisals. Not the nurses, the administration staff or the doctors. It was only the IT department that did them. 🙄
The 360 degree
This brings me to my four-day appraisal.
This occurred when I was working at the Hospitals Trust with my pedantic boss (I called him Ted). I’ve mentioned him a few times, mainly in this post.
That year, the Director of IT wanted to do a little more in terms of appraisals, so he ordered us all to do something called a 360 degree survey that he had found online (the announcement was made with a collective shoulder-slump and sigh – which he ignored). This is a set of appraisal-like questions, but you sent them to your peers, your staff and your managers. The idea was that the people that worked for you, worked with you and you worked for, could all comment on your work persona. Your staff could comment on how good a manager you were, your peers could comment on how good (or bad) you were to work with and your boss could comment on what you were like to manage.
Since the appraisal now included peers and staff, it multiplied the amount of work – and paperwork – that we all had to do by a long way. It was not a popular choice.
We had four weeks to complete the 360 along with the normal appraisal. Meeting booked with the Boss, I duly trotted off – paperwork in hand – to the boss’s office.
The appraisal
One thing I forgot to mention is that in the appraisal, your line manager had to complete similar paperwork about you. What they thought you’d achieved, what they thought you wanted to achieve. Normally, they’d have no clue what you did (it’s true!) and they’d write it on the fly, based on what you told them, or had written in your appraisal paperwork (which had to be submitted prior to the appraisal).
I started off with the year gone by. What I did well, what I didn’t do well. For every sentence I spoke, he would interrupt and disagree. Then launched into a boss-centric view of what I’d just said. And that’s how it went on. For everything I said, he would have something to counter with – and it would always be centred around him. By the time the meeting time had finished (it was three hours), we’d hardly worked through the first section of eight. More meetings were (unfortunately) booked – each three hours long.
At the end of the third day, we’d just about completed the standard appraisal and were in a position where I was well aware of my shortcomings and what I needed to do to correct them. The next day, we would go through the 360 paperwork.
The 360 paperwork
My peers – my fellow team leaders were acutely aware of the appraisal system (as we’d all been through it for years). We had a little unofficial meeting prior to the 360 degree appraisal paperwork, where we all agreed to say nothing but nice things! And that we did. If not nice, then neutral at least. We chose staff members that would do the same. But of course, we couldn’t pick our line manager. Did we cheat? Yes of course. Did it matter? No.
Most of the 360 was a multiple choice kind of thing. One of those “how do you feel about this?” and then a 1 to 10 scoring.
With that in mind, I went off to that final appraisal meeting with a spring in my step, thinking that this one will be an hour tops.
Well, that was a wrong assumption. We went through the 360 paperwork bit by bit. He treated much like the standard appraisal: for each statement, he would disagree with it and offer his own opinion, which usually was about him. He did that for every single statement, even disagreeing with the other team leaders. I ended up wondering whether I was still going to have a job at the end of it, but then remembered that hardly anyone got sacked from the NHS (at the time).
Post-appraisal (blues)
We did get the appraisal finished. Eventually. It took four days; 12 hours of meetings of pretty much a one-way conversation. The upshot – as it near enough was every single year – is that I should improve my management skills. Which of course, I never did. My staff were happy and they worked well together and they knew what they were doing. They were the only things I was concerned about.
When you had your appraisal, you were supposed to refer to your last year’s one and note any achievements or failures. For the most part, this was never done. Mainly because the goals that you had been set in the last appraisal were never achievable anyway, so it was impossible to get them done. This was glossed over many, many times and I always thought it odd. What’s the point of agreeing to do something, knowing full well you couldn’t achieve it. But that was the appraisal.
The appraisals were forgotten almost as soon as you’d stepped out of the office. There was no mention of them ever over the course of the year until the next one.
Had they been used properly, they could have made a valuable contribution to your career. As it was, they were seen as “something you had to do” and therefore a complete and utter waste of time.