To find Work Appraisals excruciating

[frankentall]

The main issue is being instructed to comment upon my own performance and achievements. I am not a dream employee, a rockstar over-achiever. Nor am I useless tosser - just an ordinary person doing an ordinary job.
Most of my job is boring and utterly pointless admin that adds no value and I hate those parts - and in my book that includes appraisals.
If I am not doing what I'm supposed to do the the required standard I expect my boss to tell me, that's part of her job managing people. Otherwise I'd like to be left alone to do the job as well as I can. But no, some git has designed a process to torture me.

always give yourself a glowing review because then the manager has to argue it down in the actual meeting and focus on getting them to remove anything remotely negative from the form. Never mention anything negative about yourself

All true. There's basically a way to write them and a sort of rubber skinned, hyper confident mentality you have to have, where you only really vaguely acknowledge a negative if the way its documented is almost positive

So if you are bad at managing deadlines/don't deliver, you turn it round to having a strong desire to help/lead/take things on, and weakly concede you perhaps have a tendency to "demand too much of yourself".

Many of the most senior people i know are fabulous at writing these in a way that is extremely difficult to counter with a genuine performance concern.

I sadly have seen them used as part of a process to remove a weaker performer but tbh even there there is often no rhyme or reason as to why one person is deemed for the cut vs another, i believe often its personality really. If the boss doesn't like you you're out.

Totally agree. My previous manager was great. I never used to fill in the forms (neither did he 👏). We disposed of the appraisal nonsense in about 3 minutes and spent the rest of the time chatting.

Unfortunately the current manager is rather more process driven. What I really want to say is that I've done a better than average job in the last year (fairly true) and my career objective is to carry on doing so until retirement (a few years away but getting ever closer 😁) without getting made redundant.

As a manager I hate doing them as well but do try to make them as constructive as possible. Ours are linked.to bonus and I feel so bad when people are marked.as achieving and don't get anything even though they are doing their job as expected 🙃

We have monthly 121's along with annual and half yearly formal appraisals.
On my 121's my manager said I usually go over to the train station, get a coffee (take it in turns to pay) and sit on a platform and chat about work, life etc.
I really don't like the formal appraisals, it feels forced and unnatural, I go to work and do my best, I don't want any training, I'm not interested in progressing (late 50's) both of us find it a waste of time

OP you are my idol. You are totally spot on - I bloody hate appraisals. Just tell me if I’m doing a shit job, I don’t need to be praised otherwise. I wanna work then clock off. The end.

Although if appraisals didn’t exist we wouldn’t have this absolute beauty of a scene

Well, this.

Please learn, people.

My manager is so lazy and useless that she doesn't do them, thank god. Never even had a 1-1 and this is in the MOD!

I'm 55, I'm counting down to retirement and there is nowhere to progress to anyway, FFS.

Civil Service ones are absolutely the worst.

I did this. It was going well until Covid and the last set of IR35 changes - then I had to go back to working for a company.