to hate work yearly reviews

[user789653]

Tomorrow I have my yearly review at work and I'm dreading it. I hate them at the best of times but this one is my first since been back at work after cancer and my confidence is so low.
Feeling so anxious about it. AIBU?

I hate them. I came out of my last one with absolutely no idea if it was good or bad. My line manager simply listed things I had done and needed to do

I used to hate them but now I work in a place where they don't do them at all. It's a fairly large sized organisation, I have no idea if people think I'm doing well and I have no formal way to discuss my career, performance or raise issues. At all. It's all informal, I'm supposed to go through my middle manager who 1) is on mat leave and 2) has no say in anything anyway, they ignore her entirely. It's actually a great way for management to ignore issues of more junior members of staff because there is no way for us to raise them.

Ugh, yes. Mine was a bloodbath last year. Not looking forward to this one.

Fucking hate them. Was supposed to do mine about errrrmmmm, two months ago. Not even wrote the fucker out yet but honestly I'm too busy at work to be bothered doing a paper exercise. Line manager also keeps saying I dont need to worry about it yet so I'm taking my sweet time.

We have monthly meetings so the end of year is completely pointless but we still have to tick the boxes to say we've done it

I hate it too, I have to have it twice a year.
They normally ask about my work/life balance but I never get told if I'm doing anything wrong or how I could improve. Then each time they ask me what courses I want to go on and I always say none as the courses are on evenings or weekends when I'm already spreading myself thin with working hours and 2 DC at home.
Hardly any praise either. So I take it I must be doing ok if no praise or ways to improve

I teach in Australia, and annual reviews are tied to progression up the pay scale.It's government-led.

Every year I have to find four ways of being better. That fit the school's agenda, not mine. That's 70 different ways since I've been here. I am not opposed to getting better at my job, far from it, just pissed off that some things I do don't count.

This year is my last one, as I'm retiring. Yay.

Epic mic drop.

I hate Smartgoals vs

I don't want to manage people so no more progression for me.

I want to do my job and go home

My company go on about development yet turn down all requests for additional trains train I g or career developme

@Thiswontendwell

Oh my goodness! Just want to put another view... I line manage a number of people (NHS-mental health) and the annual appraisals are a space to think about learning from the past twelve months (so people are invited to highlight good experiences and think about how they have developed) and then we look at the next twelve months and make SMART objectives - what do they want to achieve and how can they be supported to do it. It isn't perfect at all but it's supposed to be a supportive thing... There is another way!!! (Poor performance and disciplinary issues are addressed other ways in case people are worried about that)

You wrote this like you expect people to want to set pointless goals . I'm not given to introspection and find this sort of thing excruciating and if management have an issue they should tell me at the time not once a year.

I haaaaaaaate them but then I have two (2! TWO!) line managers and both are crap managers in different ways. Together, they makes them more stressful by doing things like

• talking about what other team members will be doing (I don't care???)
• talking about the next big project, then when I ask what my role in it will be, will tell me that I won't be involved because it's fully staffed (thanks for wasting our time, then)
• being impervious to the concept of SMART objectives or setting objectives at all (I'm to understand my job is to do whatever shit lands on my desk as soon as practicable, I think???)
• asked me if I'd like to be classed as my job role, or the one above (my job role, you numpty, particularly if I'm exceeding expectations for my job role but simply meeting expectations for the job role above me??)
• not engaging when asked about development/progression - I'm not sure how they find "I'd like to discuss what the next 3-5 years look like for me. I'd like to work toward leading a project within a reasonable timescale and set up a personal development plan for me to achieve this" confusing and impossible to respond to, but there you are. Everyone is supposed to have a personal development plan. They looked baffled until I said, "You know, with milestones to meet and a timeline," and they said we'd discuss it next appraisal (ok, I get the hint)
• the only feedback I get is "your internal clients think you're good and respond quickly to them, which relieves the pressure on them". OK, thanks. Praise is nice but feedback on how to improve would be good, particularly since you took two projects off me for arbitrary reasons.

I return to work from mat leave in two weeks and I'm dreading another fucking ineffectual appraisal. I'm dreading what a waste of time my return to work meeting will be.

I'm interviewing elsewhere specifically because I'm fed up of how I'm managed.

Yanbu, I honestly think they achieve nothing too. Its actually quite a hard process to use a poor performance review to manage someone out or even implement changes without running the risk of being in some way unfair/biased/discriminatory in some way.

Interesting read as I have the forms but have never been pressured into doing them.

Thought I would this year because I took on another site and don't work with these employees.

I also thought it would show that I had time for them to raise any issues with me and let me know if they want to develop within the company. Show I was invested in them

Not planning on focusing on their performance too much other than praising them. Maybe I'm lucky to have no long term issues with them. I wouldn't use them to bring up the little stuff

I work in HR and scrapped annual appraisals. Absolutely pointless. They take too long to do, most people only remember the stuff that’s happened in the last 3 months, out of date objectives and ratings that just demotivate.

I have replaced them with Check Ins. 20 minute conversation, on a regular basis, to ‘check in’ how someone is doing, talk about each other’s expectations, ask about support and development and give feedback. 1 page form to fill in at the end that takes about 5 minutes to complete.

We are implementing the same next year (thank god)

@Thiswontendwell, thanks for trying to make the case of reviews. Sincerely, I wanted someone to state some of that logic.

or in my case, "Annual Appraisal"

I have found my people. **
The dreaded "It's time for your appraisal!" message landed in my email box last week.
I literally blitz thru the forms as fast as possible with barely contained hostility.

Our work is moving to target & objective setting as main point of Appraisals, but I still get little out of it. I'm told that Annual Appraisal a good way to guarantee funds are allocated for CPD, is main reason to do it.

What I could actually use is ... some kind of guidance of how to handle my irritating senior colleague. My place is to run project how he likes but how he likes is obviously WRONG & he's not listening to me repeatedly tell him so. Colleague is impatient, stubborn & possibly downright dim. It's demoralising to work on a project that you know is wasted effort.

Painful aren't they! And the obsession with setting targets - there's no 'just keep on doing what you're doing' they've always got to pile more onto you (and my place especially loves setting targets that hinge on things outside of individual control which inevitably lead to failure).

I have a monthly 1-2-1 with my boss. We also have an annual review to do.

I like the 1-2-1s, we go through ongoing work, any new stuff, etc, it's a good discussion.

The annual review is a new style, I drafted the initial stuff last year and I'm now going to be going through the end of the year stuff with my boss. I think it'll be useful, for this year at least, as I have done so much additional work due to a colleague's absence on sick leave, that it will be useful to get it on record. The process will also be very useful for sorting my thoughts to beef up my LinkedIn profile.

I think I get a lot of good from our setup, simply because I have a damn good boss.

Nope. Total waste of time

We have to do the big yearly one and then monthly updates into it.
It's just all a total load of bollocks and any company I've worked for take it so seriously but once your updates are in the system it's all forgotten about

It's a tick box exercise imo

I'm about to send out the email to my team tomorrow. Everything you set as a goal in November is out the window by March anyway. Utterly pointless 😫

I don't mind it, we have monthly 1 to 1s as well and there aren't any surprises in the annual appraisals in terms of poor performance management or whatever. Its been a good way for me to document on record what training I'd like and get the funding for it to be honest, but I think if it's just a tick box exercise there's not much value.

Pointless tick boxing exercise.

Ours is no longer an appraisal, and now is a "conversation" but the form is 10 pages before you have even completed it, all rubbish about proving what specific behaviours and competencies you have shown through the year. It is dreadful, and so demoralising to keep scrolling down and see there is yet more to fill in.

the annual appraisals are a space to think about learning from the past twelve months (so people are invited to highlight good experiences and think about how they have developed) and then we look at the next twelve months and make SMART objectives - what do they want to achieve and how can they be supported to do it.
But I don’t want to think about TODAY let alone the past 12 months, and I don’t want to achieve anything and I want to be supported to do my job and not develop further in it, I’m knackered enough. Is there a format for that as an appraisal?

Ours isn’t a form, anyway. We have to do an interactive digital presentation about ourselves. Not enough in the world.

Achievements: this presentation.
Goals: winning the lottery and resigning.
Strengths: being a dick on the internet.
Weaknesses: you’ll not catch me out that way!
Areas for development: dunno, further dickery?

I line manage a number of people (NHS-mental health) and the annual appraisals are a space to think about learning from the past twelve months (so people are invited to highlight good experiences and think about how they have developed) and then we look at the next twelve months and make SMART objectives - what do they want to achieve and how can they be supported to do it.
It isn't perfect at all but it's supposed to be a supportive thing...

[Grin]

Oh that did make me laugh.

Yes, we all know that they tick a box for big organisations to say they are looking after their staff, but I'd have thought anybody working in Mental Health services for the NHS is in the same boat, of

"Yes, I know the service we provide is absolutely crap because we can only get to see about 1% of the people who need our services, and the waiting time is ludicrous, and the needs are magnified because intervention isn't soon enough, and there are no beds when we need them or clinics or therapists we need to refer to, due to the chronic underfunding over decades and decades now been compounded by the cuts to all the other services that used to share a little of the load (Family Support, etc) but I also know I am working my socks off and just have nothing left to give. I know what would solve it - 100x more staff - is never going to be provided, so what is the point in us both wasting 2 hours sitting listing the same things as last year ?"

Because obviously sitting there dreaming up SMART targets about how any member of staff is supposed to manage a caseload that should be shared between 8 members of staff is such a useful way to while away two hours.