“Nothing that ever appears on an employees formal performance review should ever be a surprise to an employee.”
I believe that this statement is true. An employee should never have to guess what is going to reflected upon in a performance review. In order to achieve this the criteria being reviewed, should be clearly defined and actually be measurable.
In order to accomplish this effectively the methods of performance management need to be structured and process driven.
The first step of that process should be to have defined goals for the organization and performance objectives, that will the north star for step two which is to develop employee goals, behavior and actions to meet these performance objectives. These objectives that are set will be what the employee will be reviewed on at a performance review. Throughout the work year an effective manager will provide support and discuss the objectives. The employee will be evaluated and receive continuous feedback about how they performing and will learn to see areas that could be improved to increase performance. By following a process the employee should not be the dark about the expectations of the organization.
“I Quit”
This leads me to think about how Organizational Behavioral knowledge gave me the confidence to free myself from a toxic workplace. When you become equipped with the knowledge you start to see clearly where an organization is not being effective and is actually destroying the well being of it’s employees. When the management of an organization do not have a strategic plan and is not thinking about how their decisions affect the future development of the business. Without this plan there will never have a training procedures designed that will lead to clear goals for employees.
They don’t need help they just miss their slaves.
What I’ve learned is that some organizations are happy to have staff that they “take care of” as long they keep the wages at the minimum and utilize employees only when needed. This results in employees that being under utilized which is a form of organizational waste. Anybody that is happy with being average will be grateful that they don’t have to push themselves and spend their day doing only exactly what is given to them. In my situation I was being driven mad because when I tried to do more that I saw that could be part of a strategic vision for the aspects that mattered to what I could control.
My Experience
My experience was that I was accused of trying to move too fast, and “running before I could walk” . I noticed that these managers actively put up barriers in my way to slow me down like taking off the internet on the workstation that I used for AutoCAD. Their thoughts come from the idea that they could not trust what employees would do when not constantly being monitored. How would an organization like this survive in a world of remote workers? That was major red flag. This goes against good performance management procedures. Also another toxic trait was that the manager would not create a listed criteria of expectations and change what they wanted day to day. These expectations were subjective based on the whims of management.
For example the manager verbally attacked me on the day I was giving my two week notice saying things like “You can’t even do AutoCAD without having multiple reviews.” This was disrespectful because I clearly articulated that I mostly had experience in 3D-modeling with another software and I would only receive one drawing every few months as this was not my main role. This comes from a person that has no idea what goes into any of the jobs being performed by their employees or the time required to get the results demanded.
Made me wait three weeks once for my annual performance review and kept changing the time because he was “busy”. He also felt personally attacked when you try to negotiate your worth. I learned afterwards that he did that so they could have more control of the negotiation. This manager forced me to change the date on my two weeks notice to the same day because he did not want to “Drag it out any longer” and threatened that he would force me to sit upstairs alone in the conference room so I could have a “time out” for two weeks before I leaved. Further more, they made a spectacle of showing everyone in the company that he’s kicking me out of the building immediately. This manager constantly made “disrespectful comments” because he thought there was nothing anyone could do about it. That shows how he infantilized his employees. Even when many of his employees were quitting because of being miss treated he continued to shift the blame on to them. I also noticed this same manager triangulated employees against each other so he could have control. He would say comments that other people said about you even if it was true, it seemed as if he took pride in fooling his people.
My final straw was when he tried to pull my notebook out of hands because he wanted to see what I was writing about and I said no because I was not comfortable sharing my undeveloped thoughts. I am on the extreme side of being an introverted so someone trying to read my notes without my permission made me feel violated. When I went to pick up my left over stuff after leaving, I found a letter noted to me trying to black mail me into not speaking up because of notes they found that was deemed to inappropriate, even though I never shared me thoughts with anyone. They never even gave me a second to get my stuff on the day that the manager forced me out.
Conclusion
To me this story reflects the opposite of an example of an organization that valued their employees and valued high performance. As I learned what positive organizations do by being educated in Management Principles, it made me sick to part of a place that they did not want to change the status quo.
This article is part of my goal to write everyday for an hour and post it everyday. It may not be edited to my standards but the goal is create value and get content out everyday.
