MegaCorp Nonsense

Key Season Crying

Performance review season was never my favorite time at MegaCorp. We used to call the time of year before reviews “key season” – as colleagues would jockey to hype their accomplishments in front of the boss & each other.

Otherwise soft-spoken managers would miraculously show up for routine staff meetings holding a list of “all the amazing things my team got done this past year”.   Everyone wanted to work in a bunch of humble brags before their colleagues got the forms to write 360 feedback on them! 

Rather than do it voluntarily, we’ve seen Federal workers get offended when they are asked to acknowledge what they’ve been doing. There seems to be far less interest in safeguarding taxpayer $, than we had for shareholder $.

It’s not a good look when your employees fight such a simple request. Worse yet, several government agencies told their employees not to respond. It’s a good reminder to have a plan to protect yourself from the ridiculousness in Washington DC.

How did you approach performance reviews in your organization / career?

Image: Gary Varvel, Creators.com

17 thoughts on “Key Season Crying”

  1. At my former employer, the review/bonus season lasted 4-5 months from Jan-May. It was always a stressful time as the impressions during this period did make a difference in your comp. My biggest complaint is that it created a strong incentive not to be authentic and instead focus on supporting whatever was being pushed down. I’m glad I’m out of that game. 🙂

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  2. Probably the best managed company I ever worked at was the Tommy Bartlett Water Ski Show during the summers of my first three years of college. Tommy Bartlett was a smart man who was smart enough to hire a professor from Cornell University’s College of Hospitality Management to manage the show he founded. The manager he hired allowed you to earn more by doing more. I sold tickets and if you sold better and higher priced reserved seats you earned more. He needed people over 18 to vend beer during intermission. He tracked how many trays of beer I sold. He needed people to go out early in the morning and put leaflets for the show on cars parked in hotel parking lots and track how many people attended the show on the days you papered. He needed someone to blow the lengthy trails to the show site and tracked this. At the end of the summer you would sit down with the President and he would run through how many cheap seats and good seats you sold, the number of trays of beer I sold, how many people attended the show on days I papered the cars and how many times I blew the trails. He then would cut you a check that was enough to pay for Tuition, Room and Board and Incidentals (mostly beer) at the University of Wisconsin. My first summer, I cleared $2,550 and the All-Inclusive Price at the UW was $1,700.

    I remember him saying one thing that really stood out and stuck with me. “You now what you get when you pay people by the hour. You get hours. I want results. People who help me make more money, make more money.”

    Back to the civil serpents and listing five things they did this week, I am appalled that they have lost their sense of accountability to their true bosses, the American Taxpayers. Last week an NSA whistleblower uncovered around a 100 transgender DEI hires who were using NSA’s top secret messaging systems to run a perverts forum. What are they going to list. Five positions? Five unique places? This story had barely broke and it soon came up that Tulsi Gabbard had already identified and fired them.

    Elon Musk has stated that he is looking for proof of life and are the ‘workers’ who are receiving paychecks even reading their emails.

    Even though I am retired, I still draw up a weekly list of things I want to do. Here’s this week’s. 1) Ordered a new refrigerator drawer that was broken. 2) Vacuumed the van out and put the rear bench seat back in. 3) Meet with my backup generator Project Manager to get a status. 4) Troubleshot my wife’s car and scheduled an appointment with the transmission shot that probably misconnected a wire. 5) Permanently mount my Starlink Antenna to be used as a back to my Fiber Optic Internet. 6) Met with a small Water Recirculation Pump Controller Manufacturer, ordered equipment and installed it. 7) Filled three yard waste bins for ongoing brush clearance. 8) Today for something fun, I am going to the gun range with my son.

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    1. That Hospitality Professor certainly knew what he was doing. When working, I was a pretty good “list person” with weekly & monthly objectives. In retirement, I don’t do that overtly – but I usually know in my head what I need to get done. I could certainly type out 5 accomplishments if I needed to show I have a pulse.

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      1. Here is a thought about why having a list is great, even if you are retired. My wife wants to do everything all at once without making a list. Of course everything is number one priority. I show her the list and ask her to pick what she thinks needs to be done first. When she picks one, I inform her how long I think it will take. It forces one of the emotional realm into the rational realm.

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      2. That list sounds like what my team at MegaCorp would share with me when I came up with another “priority”! 🙂

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  4. During my career I viewed the performance appraisal process, which changed more frequently than needed so as to support the need for Human Resources Training Program as a pain, until I became the boss of the division. I had three main reports and the entire division was 17 people. This was a risk management division in which more than half adjusted claims and the remainder industrial safety and administration. I am a big believer in statistics and measurement and monthly I would meet with the three groups, liability, workers’ compensation and safety to review the prior month’s numbers and issues everyone was dealing with. The nature of the work was a team approach and the typical metrics really didn’t apply so appraisals were more of a narrative of what was done well, what could be improved and training needs going forward.

    What was interesting was the appraisal system that I implemented for vendors utilizing a points based system for what they did well and where they failed or needed improvements. I found this to be particularly effective opening their eyes to areas of their operations needing improvement. I recall a vendor with a score of 89.5 which is very good but two areas of failing scores. I was pleased with their overall work but this honed in on where they needed to improve. I also had a multiplier for categories which were important to me so a perfect score of 10 could be multiplied to 14. The areas in which I needed excellence they did very well but I was critical of certain things and given no multiplier it did not drag down the score much.

    I was also in the consulting business and some days my inbox, physical and electronic were higher at the end of the day than the beginning. That told me that those were my most productive days as I was providing service rather than getting to the normal work. That led me to once a quarter document my time and analyze what I was actually spending my time on and that helped with analyzing staffing needs and explain to my superiors who and what I was advising on.

    Always Be Improving

    Today with my part time consulting I am continually amazed at how little people understand about their industry, employer and job. Sadly, we get the employees we deserve. Those frightened by DOGE should be frightened the gravy train is ending.

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    1. Your vendor evaluation process would be very helpful to companies that listen to their customers. I was a Sales Engineer for quite a bit of my career and found that customers often came up with applications for our products that no one thought of. Good things happen with direct communication between users and product designers. Surveys driven by marketing misses out on opportunities for companies to improve their products and grow.

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      1. I do some occasional consulting for that vender now and they are the client. I also had a project with another client of theirs that I suggested changes to contract terms not favorable to them but fair to quote Spike Lee, Do The Right Thing

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      2. Several companies I worked at over the years hired customers to be implementation consultants, product support and sales. Nothing beats having customer facing people who actually know how to use a product.

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      4. There is an insights process some companies use (including my former MMMegaCorp) called ‘Lead User’. The idea was to uncover new uses and modifications of products by querying the customer base on how they are using / adapted products. If you use their products “as directed” they move on. For this process, they want to speak to those that are doing unique things.

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    2. Agree – As the old saying goes, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” It sounds like you were quite diligent in ensuring that was the case!

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      1. Probably one of the best known ‘misuses’ of a company’s product are the Wisconsin Cheese Heads. The product started out as a lowly chip bowl until some marketing genus decided to start wearing one on his head, and it sort of caught on.

        Here is my all time favorite Cheese Head Story. Back when Brett Favre was starting to have his run, the Dallas Cowboys had to play the Packers in the NFL Championships. One of my coworkers had a Troy Aikman autographed helmet on his bookcase that he won as a sales incentive. I spoke to our mutual boss that morning and he let me into his office to replace his Troy Aikman helmet with a Cheese Head before he got into work. The guy went half the day without realizing the switch-a-roo had taken place. Our mutual boss went into the guy’s office and gave a soliloquy in front of the Cheese Head. Finally our victim realized he had been had. It was epic.

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      2. I am a Green Bay Packers shareholder, but haven’t ever invested in a Cheesehead. It’s amazing that they have now been around for 25+ years!

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  5. Hi Mr Fire Station,

    I think we all agree the Federal Goverment and for that matter all companies could be run better. None of them are perfect. If DOGE was coming in and doing their cuts in a thoughtful way and making actual meaningful change, most everyone would be behind then. Instead they are constantly making mistakes and cutting generally the wrong people. As a Federal Government employee, I am watching massive harm to tax payers take place on the daily. Good hardworking people who work to make your life better are losing their jobs everyday.

    So Federal Government employees don’t trust DOGE. If you were us, would you? It is not a lack of willingness to respond, but a complete lack of trust. Trust me, my five bullet points were incredibly long because I was trying to cover everything I did that week.

    Political Appointees as you mentioned kept flip flopping on whether or not they wanted us to respond. If you are trying to keep a job you love, who do you appease? Both groups can fire you.

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    1. I’m certainly not a fan of how the DOGE team is unthoughtfully “taking action”. I’m actually not clear on what they are doing (if anything) compared to the Cabinet Secretaries, who (in my mind) should be charged with leading this effort.

      I did see this article where OMB / OPM heads laid out what considerations should be used in making headcount decisions. It seemed as clear and thoughtful as any restructuring action I’ve seen in private industry. (Better than some, in fact).

      https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/federal-personnel-budget-memo-reorganization-plans/

      I know layoffs are frustrating g and mistakes are made, but regular “pruning” of an organization is critical. The Federal government has done this so infrequently that many feel a hatchet is needed in certain places. In our state, union contracts make it almost impossible to make the best decisions on who gets let go, as they reward tenure, not performance. It seems like that is also playing a role in the Federal decisions.

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