Jul 24, 2011

I had a bit of a fight with my boss this past week.

It was time for my annual review at the hardware store and it turns out that I am a worse employee than I was a year ago. 

Not demonstrably worse, you understand, just worse on the "I'm the boss and I say so" scale. 


Like most employee evaluations, this one was riddled with the inexplicable.


For instance, why are there ratings from 1 to 5, in areas  where the boss says no one can get a five?

Me:  Why did I get a four for attendance?  I had perfect attendance.

Her:  How do you "greatly exceed" average attendance?  Perfect attendance is exceeds expectations, which is a four.

Me:  By not missing any days?

Her:  That's a four.

Me:  Why is there a five on the form?

Her:  You can't get a five.

In the end, I got the boss to admit that she downgraded me because she had orders from the owner to limit the raises this year due to slow sales.

Had she opened our session with that information, the whole process would have gone smoothly. Instead, she spent three-fourths of the time trying to justify her appraisal, meaning, I spent three-fourths of the time giving her grief about it.
 





Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky

7 comments:

tut-tut said...

geez, it never ends, does it?

The Bug said...

I hate performance reviews - & my boss hates them too. We just go through the motions to satisfy corporate & he requests the highest raise possible for me. It's not much. Our company handles the issue by putting a cap on raises, not by having managers "create" lower reviews.

Kurt said...

They should be grateful to have you.

e said...

Time to leave the hardware store and that boss? As Kurt said, they should be grateful.

alphabet soup said...

Oh how I hated performance reviews for the absolute sham they were.
All this going through the motions for who knows what?

Not more money for you it seems, but maybe for the people who dream these things up??

I had to have a good long think just then to find a family friendly descriptive word and people is my best effort.

All the others would have had me barred from commenting on your blog Merle!!

Ms Soup

alphabet soup said...

Oh how I hated performance reviews for the absolute sham they were.
All this going through the motions for who knows what?

Not more money for you it seems, but maybe for the people who dream these things up??

I had to have a good long think just then to find a family friendly descriptive word and people is my best effort.

All the others would have had me barred from commenting on your blog Merle!!

Ms Soup

Steve Reed said...

I once had a boss whose idea of a performance review was calling me into his office every six months and telling me: "You're doing fine."

Alas, with all the managerial fluff being taught out there, those days are probably gone.