Category Archives: Uncategorized

Continuous, Real-Time, Semi-Structured Feedback Instead of Annual Reviews

In a question on Quora about how a start-up should handle performance reviews, John Lilly writes:

After believing in annual reviews for most of my career, I don’t really believe in them anymore. Not timely enough, demoralizing in general (everyone thinks they’re above average), and just a hell of a lot of work for everyone. This negative view of annual & traditional reviews is quite strongly supported by university research — it’s just counter-productive, even though we all think we should do it.

brains learn more effectively from success than from failure

i watched Kevlin Henney’s talk from NDC 2011 on cognitive biases tonight.  about 15-20 min in he references a study on how the brain learns from success and failure.

we learn better from success because of how we’re wired in the brain.

this should inform us in a lot of contexts – that goes for the rest of the biases mentioned in the talk, too.

some of those contexts:

  • failed projects – learning from, what you change next time
  • strengths-based thinking
  • reviews, retrospectives
  • learning all sorts of new stuff
  • how you teach stuff, trying to get others to learn
  • business startups (perhaps motivation for lean startups)
  • creating prosess based on revealing failure…
  • estimates – expecting them to get better next time
  • budgets (optimism, large numbers)
  • comprehension of complexity in code
  • adding people to a project mid-project
  • testing
  • usability (from programmers’ perspective)
  • multitasking, in work and life
  • meetings
  • planning
  • tolerance for randomness, variation in software development

 

yearly performance review is out-dated

from an article in Wired by Thomas Goetz, How Facebook Uses Feedback Loops: Meet Rypple.

 

How does Facebook keep its employees happy? Feedback. Lots and lots of feedback.

….
“Workplace productivity has been stuck to a 50-year-old, paper-based performance-review cycle,” says Daniel Debow, Rypple’s co-founder and co-CEO.

….
“Our company has always been built around feedback loops,” says Facebook engineering director Bob Trahan, who counts himself as employee 45. “Everything we do in engineering is reviewed: Engineer A reviews what Engineer B does. We have design reviews twice a week. We track performance metrics for code, in terms of speed and time.”

….
The whole process of managing employee performance and providing feedback has been in need of an overhaul for some time. The 360-degree review was popularized in the 1990s
….
“three-sixties” have many limitations, the biggest of which is that they typically happen only once a year.

In 2000, Jai Ghorpade, a professor of management at San Diego State University, conducted a review of more than 600 employee feedback studies, only 30 percent of which showed improvements in employee performance. Another 30 percent reported decreases in employee performance after a feedback review, and the rest reported no impact at all. “While it delivers valuable feedback, the 360-degree concept has serious problems relating to effectiveness,” Ghorpade concluded.