Evaluate THIS

[muckefuck]

I think every year I bitch about what a complete fucking pain-in-the-ass our annual evaluations are. Writing them is easily the worst part of my job. Not because of my employees--as far as I'm concerned, they are solid gold and worth more to the institution than others who pull down twice their salaries. No, because of the bureaucratic nonsense that kicks in once I have my draughts prepared. It kicks off a cycle of the higher-ups clucking about "inflation" and trying to beat my scores back down to mediocre levels and me responding by padding the descriptions with ever greater torrents of jargon in a rearguard effort to stave this off.

It's all terribly dispiriting, as if the bosses are saying that they just don't believe we have such talented people working for us and that, let's be honest, they have to suck more than I'm willing to say. Sure, I know that other departments whitewash a lot in their evaluations. That doesn't mean I'm doing the same. So I feel obligated to play the stupid game--my supervisor is big advocate of parroting the verbiage associated with the various ratings in order to "increase the the chance that they will stand"--in order not to see them shortchanged. But I resent it. Every year, it serves as a glaring reminder of everything that is wrong about this place. And every year I find myself edging closer to mouthing off about how sick I am of pretending that the liver-spotted emperor has garments of ermine-trimmed sable.

All the process serves to do (besides eat of acres of time which could be spent productively) is to paint a layer of false objectivity onto a process which is fundamentally subjective and arbitrary. Other supervisors don't write as well as I do or have as much time to spend revising the forms, so their employees get shafted. And that's assuming that they're capable of recognising good work in the first place, which clearly not all of them are. It's the kind of corporate bullshit I'm immersed in every day here, but distilled to a point where I can no longer stomach it at all.

Comments

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I think that's probably true of most annual evaluations processes. They instituted normalization in our reviews a couple of years ago, too. Of course, we have to write our own evals, including numeric ratings on a dozen cirteria, and then management just tweaks them.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I used to think that regular evaluations were a tremendous improvement over no evaluations, but now I'm not so sure. I really do wonder if they can ever achieve a satisfactory degree of objectivity for anything more complex than widget production. Or, to quote one of my colleagues, "These forms would be fine for bank clerks, but not for the kind of work we do." I'd agree, except I'm not even sure how suitable they are for bank clerks.