Podcast: What's Wrong With Performance Reviews And How To Fix Them (With Matt Courtois)

TEFL Training Institute Podcast

We talk about why performance reviews get a bad reputation, why they’re not all bad and what teachers and managers can do to get the most out of them.

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Tracy Yu: Hello, everybody. Welcome to our podcast today. We've got our guest, Matt Courtois. Hey, Matt.

Matt Courtois: Hey, guys. How's it going?

Tracy: Good. Today what we're going to talk about, Ross?

Ross Thorburn: What's one of my pet peeves? I think it's one of the things that's most commonly done badly ‑‑ performance reviews and performance appraisals.

Tracy: OK. I think that's maybe two sides, right? One is for the manager who are going to do the performance appraisal with the employee, and they may feel nervous or are probably not doing the right way. Also, the employee feel nervous about how they are going to be told.

Ross: Yeah, it's kind of like that thing, isn't it? It's like everyone's dreading it more than everyone else.

Matt: I don't know. You gave me performance appraisals. I don't know if you felt this or not, but I was always...I don't want to say nervous, but I am.

Ross: You had good reasons to be.

[laughter]

Matt: I was always close to getting angry, I think, at a performance appraisal. I was in a defensive state of mind when going into the performance appraisal always. It's not just you. It happened before you as well.

Ross: Thanks. I was feeling really guilty.

[laughter]

Tracy: OK. There are three questions and the first one ‑‑ what is performance review and why do we do it? Second?

Ross: How can managers make performance reviews worthwhile?

Matt: How can employees make performance reviews worthwhile?

[music]

Tracy: OK. Why do we need to do performance reviews? It seems a rule and yet a lot of companies, especially for the annual performance review. Then the manager and employee sit together and discuss how much salary is going to be increased for next year.

Ross: Not necessarily. I think that's one thing that can happen, but I think it is most basic. It's just a thing where you can give someone feedback every year or every six months. Companies have built into their program that everyone's going to get feedback once a year. Even if you've got the worse manager ever that never gives you feedback, that's going to happen at least once a year.

Matt: Performance appraisals have always been one of my pet peeves. You mentioned earlier that it's one of your pet peeves, but the way you just described it sounds like a decent thing. What is it that you have against performance appraisals?

Ross: I think if you're a good manager, they're completely pointless. You should just be giving people feedback all the time. I think that's one thing. I think the second thing is what Tracy meant is it's like your performance gets tied to your salary.

There's a quote, I think it's from this guy called Peter Schultz, and he says that...and I'm paraphrasing here, "We use tools to measure people's performance that are so rough, we wouldn't use them to weigh out vegetables in a supermarket."

There's one more thing I wanted to mention why I dislike performance reviews. One common thing that happens is the employee or the teacher in this case. You have to rate yourself. How good do you think you did on these points?

The manager also has to rate the same person, and it always results in conflict, because people always think that they are better than they are. Here's a little clip from Sam Harris's podcast. This is him discussing this same cognitive bias.

Sam Harris: People assume that they are reliably doing what even the best of the experts are doing.

Tristan Harris: This is kind of related to the Dunning Kruger effect, and some variation of that everyone is more. What was it like 90 percent of people think they're better than average drivers?

Sam Harris: Yeah. I think the stat that reveals that this moves into a fairly high level of education, at least, is I think it is 95 percent of college professors think that they're above average professors.

Tristan Harris: It's just the universal ways that will overestimate something or that we would assume that we have the moral or cognitive moves that everybody else has.

Ross: You can hear from that that everyone's sort of like pre‑programmed to think that they're better than they are. Which probably has some advantages day‑to‑day that probably makes people feel more confident, but when you get into this kind of rating thing and performance reviews, then it's going to cause a conflict.

Matt: I remember in one of my first performance appraisals in my last company, one of the categories was attendance. It was on a spectrum from terrible to excellent, and I was marked as average. I hadn't missed a single day of work. I've never been late. I've never left early. I was always there for the entire shift, and I was marked as average.

I mentioned this to my manager, and she was like, "Yeah, that's what we expect of you. So you're in the middle."

[laughter]

Ross: You're outstanding.

Matt: Yeah. How can you have...? There's this conflict that didn't...If I missed a class, you would think the manager would come to me right then and there and say, "You've got to get to work. Come to class. Don't miss class again."

Ross: You don't need to wait six months to tell someone.

Matt: Yeah. Even if you did deal with it at that point, what's the value in six months later, revisiting all your tenants, "Remember that one time six months ago?" There's no value in that. It's just beating a dead horse.

Tracy: I think that's a very important thing for performance review, remember it's not just happened once a year, and it should be constant. Like you mentioned early on, if you give the feedback in six months' time, and it's not meaningful anymore, random people probably already forgot or changed the behavior during this period of time.

Usually, for a middle‑sized company, there should be four times feedback or review with employee ‑‑ at least twice about job planning and then twice about feedback, before the annual performance review.

Matt: I have seen value in having a performance appraisal because you set your goals for the next six months. It gives you some longer‑term direction on what you want to do beyond what are you doing this week. I do see some value in that.

Ross: Absolutely. I think there are some things that can be good in this. I think you pointed at one, right? That you can clarify the expectations like, "These are the things that we expect you to do." Another useful thing about it is that people expect them to happen. It's almost like a sign of professionalism.

If you're in a company that doesn't do performance reviews, most people would interpret that as being, "This is not very professional at fit."

Matt: I do think it would be awkward for your manager to come out of the blue and, for no reason, talk about your career aspirations. I do think having some formality, and some process to this conversation is really helpful.

Tracy: It's always useful for the managers to find out what kind of support you can give to the employee. Because for different reasons, maybe you are not very clear about what the needs of the employee. During the conversation, you can find out and give specific support to this person.

Matt: Every performance review I did within my last round, I had this spiel that I said at the beginning of everyone that is kind of like this where I was saying, "Day to day as a manager, you know what I expect of you." We talked about it every day.

If you mess up, or if there's some mistake, we deal with it then, but we don't ever have the conversation about what your expectations are of me and of the company. This is a good opportunity where you're saying what you value here. "Do you feel undervalued? What don't you enjoy?" Stuff like that. I think it's cool to give them that platform to talk about their aspirations and stuff.

[music]

Ross: Let's talk about what managers can do to give good performances. Maybe I can start with an example of something cool that my ex‑boss did was when I was a manager at the time. He would email all the people that reported to me and ask them about 5 or 10 questions about how easy is it to communicate with Ross. Do you feel you get enough support from him?

Then we just got through face to face with the answers. It was really interesting getting that feedback because people don't often tell you that what you're doing that's annoying them. If someone asks, then they maybe will tell you, and then the opposite's also true that you do it's nice to hear, "Oh, this thing that you do for these people, they really, really appreciate that."

Matt: I bet the entire time that you're going through that performance review, you were thinking, "Did Matt say this about me? Was that Tracy?" That's how I would be reacting. [laughs]

Ross: You just say, "Oh, this person said this about you. This person said this about you." I think what he would do in that situation is he would say, "Let me know if you want any of your comments to be anonymous." In my experience doing this as well, because most people were quite happy.

Tracy: I think for that situation, it's just like the people who are asked the questions were pretty honest and transparent. They respect this value of passing on the feedback to that person. I'm sure in a lot of environments, probably people still kind of worry about if they're probably going to be punished or losing their job and everything.

Ross: I do know someone that happened to. They gave feedback on their manager, and it was meant to be anonymous. The manager found out, and the person got fired.

Matt: No. [laughs] Really? That's awful.

Ross: I think you obviously need to tempo what you're saying to a certain extent.

Tracy: I think my experience I want to share something that could be improved is during the performance review. There were a lot of things seems very surprising for me. For example, I wasn't very clear about what the company or my manager expect from me, and I was, "Oh, OK. I really didn't know that." Clearly, at the very beginning, the goal or expectations wasn't set very clearly.

Maybe what I was doing, I try to spend a lot of time and efforts my manager or company didn't recognize at the end.

Ross: I think that comes down to the setting up of the review. That should be the beginning of the process. You talk about here is what we expect from you. This is what you're going to get reviewed on, at the very beginning.

I think so often, that doesn't happen. I have even been asked to write what I'm going to get reviewed on the day before the review.

[laughter]

Matt: That's the goal‑setting we were talking about before, right? That can be useful to have you write your own. What are you going to be reviewed on six months and then for the next six months? You're working on these things, and it comes from you.

Tracy: It's like planning of the lesson. Find the learning gap. You know what the students they've already know, and they're good at and then what is the lesson objective. Find out the learning moments, and then these are the achievable goals or target language for the students. I think for employee, probably something similar, right?

Ross: I like that analogy, isn't it? It's almost like if you sign up for an English course, and then there's certain things that you probably have to learn or decided on by the coursebook, but there's still kind of room to negotiate, isn't there? To suit the students' individual preferences and I think it's the same with the employees.

[music]

Ross: We talked a bit about what managers can do there, but not everyone's blessed with having a great manager. If you're a teacher, what can you do to make sure that you get the most out of your annual review with your boss?

Tracy: I think the first thing is when you started the job and probably good to talk to your manager. How many times or how frequently you want to get feedback from him or her. At least then they have an idea, "Oh, actually, this person won't want me to give feedback."

Ross: I did that the last time I started a new job at the halfway point of my probation. It was at three months, I said, "Hi, can we sit down and talk about how my probation is going? I want just you to go through what you think's going well, what you think is not going well, and any other tips you think that are going to help me meet your expectations."

Matt: Like I said before, I'm one of those employees who does get defensive going into a performance review. I try not to react strongly in that meeting room. I just note stuff down and let it sit for a day or two. Then I think, coming at it from a less defensive perspective, I think I can let some of that feedback get a little bit better.

A couple of days later, reevaluate again. You can get a lot out of it.

Tracy: The reflection ‑‑ it's probably the most important and useful stage after the conversation between the employee and manager. You really need to take some time to sit down and how could you learn from this experience, and what you'd do to make it better.

Ross: To play devil's advocate to that, though, it depends on your goal. If your goal is to get some information that's going to help you develop, then great, maybe it is a good idea to sit back and take notes and everything.

But if you really want to go in and you want to negotiate, to get a pay rise, then maybe it is best to be defensive and go, "Hey, I can actually show you 10 other situations when that's not the case."

Matt: I think also, if you're an employee who is receiving feedback on their performance review and you feel blindsided by it, you clearly don't have good communication with your manager. I think sitting down in that room, that once every six months is in some ways, you can establish that back and forth.

I wouldn't get defensive, but I think you can say whenever people are criticizing you. You can say well, like, "What's the way that we can avoid this in the future." I'd appreciate it if when that happens if we can deal with it then and there, rather than six months later. Then maybe you can look at repairing a relationship with your manager.

[music]

Tracy: OK. Thanks, everybody, and see you next time. Thanks, Matt.

Matt: Cheers.