Legal Requirements - an excuse to impose Performance Appraisals

Hi guys, in this blog post I want to explain why we do not need to have Performance Appraisals in our companies for the sake of having “official written prof” about people´s performance.

Every time I speak at a conference about this topic (Abolishing Performance Appraisals) there are always a couple of voices pointing out to the fact that we cannot abolish Performance Appraisals because if companies need to fire people they need to have the written prof about the performance of the person and this prof comes from the yearly reports that managers fill in during the Performance Appraisal meeting.

Well let´s explore this idea… If this is really true, how is it possible that startups can fire people? Most of the startups do not have any Performance Appraisals sessions. This is a “virus” that usually Human Resource departments create when companies start growing. They think companies must become more professional and they must help their own employees. And as a result they install this obsolete process. So how come startups can fire people even without having Performance Appraisals in place?

I think the answer is quite easy. You do not need to have useless yearly meeting to make it official how good or bad you are performing, right? What companies need is to have a written prof about people´s performance if things go wrong. So why on earth people came up with the idea of having Performance Appraisals sessions for a legal reason?

Let me tell you a story… This is a real story that happened several years ago. This story will demonstrate how you can actually document everything that is needed to fire a person, or to protect a person if things go really wrong.

At that time I was working in a fantastic company, a world wide e-commerce company. To be honest I believe this company was one of the best companies if not the best company I ever worked in until today. Unfortunately, my manager was far from being a great manager. She had great manipulative skills, which were not used the right way.

I worked there as an Agile Coach. I worked with about 200 engineers around the world in three different continents. I knew exactly what were the problems that were affecting the engineering team and I was doing my best to help them. Like it happens in many other companies, my manager did not have any contact whatsoever with mine or team´s daily work, therefore she decided to dump me some interesting objectives she thought were important.

During months, I ignored her goals and concentrated on actions that would help the organisation and the teams to improve and become better until one day that something wrong started happening. Me and my boss we had a weekly 1:1, but we never exchanged any kind of written information, or at least not until I got the first email.

One day, after our 1:1 meeting, I got an email from her where she listed all the points that I was under-performing. Most of the points were related with her imposed goals. To be honest, at that time I did not even associate that action with any kind of legal action. I was just too upset and sad with that. It was a long , detailed and negative email where she listed all my “problems”. I still remember, not even one good thing was listed.

I do not have words to describe what I was feeling. I felt sad, frustrated and angry. Fortunately, I have great friends around me so I was able to talk with one of them and explained what was going on. When I finished the story he immediately told me: “Go to your lawyer, she is trying to get some proof to fire you.”. I followed his advice and I went to my lawyer who really confirmed what my friend told me. All that written information could be used against me legally.

I asked for the advice, what could I do to protect myself from that crap. I explained that people who worked with me loved my work and enjoyed to work with me. So how could I protect myself from what was happening? He immediately told me to use the same strategy, to gather a lot of written data so that I could prove my competence.

Next day I went home and I created a big online survey asking all different kind of questions about my professionalism and competence. That survey was sent to more than 200 engineers. The feedback was incredible, some answers stated that I helped them to become a better professionals and taught them things in few months that no one else was able to do it in years. On a scale from 0 (worst) to 10 (the best) the lowest grade in more than 70 answers was 8. That was the proof that I needed to protect myself in a legal way.

Few weeks later, the Human Resources (by the way when the heck are companies going to rename this crappy title? People are people, they are not resources ;) ) called me to their office. Of course I was already predicting what the topic was, so I printed out all the “legal proof” and took it with me to the meeting. “Surprisingly”, the HR director told me that we had an issue with my performance. I smiled and waited for him to finish.

After his speech, he asked me what should we do. At that point I showed the survey results to him. He was shocked with the outcome, then I asked: “So do you believe my manager who does not have any clue what I do, or do you believe 70 engineers who work with me on daily basis? If you guys want to go into court I am ready for it!”

I can tell you the guy was in shock! He did not have a clue what´s going on, he did not even know how to answer me. With so much information protecting myself they never dare to even touch on the topic. At the end, I changed to a different team with a different manager and at some point I was forced to leave and proceed with my life at another company (which is a fantastic company as well ) and I ´ve never heard about Human Resources any more, at least not regarding this topic.

The point of this history does not have anything to do with the fight between my ex-manager and myself. The idea of this story is much more powerful! As you can see we did not need any Performance Appraisals meeting to make information legal, we simply needed to have written information that could be used for any purposes. So next time you want to say we need to have Performance Appraisals meetings because of legal requirements think twice! You need to have the legal documentation, but you do not need to have Performance Appraisals.

Related to the written part and not so much to the Performance Appraisals, there is another topic the Human Resources departments mention several times. In their view, if you have written information about individual performance or personal development it´s easier for companies to manage situations where the manager leaves the job. Having everything written makes the transition easier for the new manager and for the employee since all information is in a written format.

In theory this might be the case, but my personal experience with dozens of managers tells me something different. Based on my experience in the majority of the cases this process does not work. Most of the new managers will ignore what happened in the past and will start from scratch with his employee. How many of you had some training planned and your new manager said “Well, let´s put it on hold for couple of months to see if this is really necessary”?

There are much better ways to do this handover. Couple of times I experienced something very powerful, something very simple, but extremely effective. In some companies, when a manager leaves the position, one of his responsibilities is to have a meeting with the employee and the new manager. This meeting serves the purpose to handover any information that is interesting and necessary to the new manager and to give the the employee an opportunity to explain what are the pending topics that must be addressed by the new manager.

It´s a very simple process, but it works very well. I really do not understand why companies don´t do it more often relying on official files that no one cares about. Sometimes the manager who is going to leave does not have the chance to meet the new manager. But there might be an an interim-manager who can do the handover and will then pass it to the final manager.

As you can see, legal requirements are a “good” excuse to force Performance Appraisals in companies. As I explained, you can have all the necessary information to take legal actions without having the need to execute Performance Appraisals.

This blog post is part of my new book that I am writing: Get Rid of Performance Appraisals that you can find here. If you are interested on the topic please subscribe as a Beta Reader and receive the 1st part for free. HERE

Picture Credits to: Deb Nystrom

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