Performance Evaluation Forms

𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐝𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰𝐬. I'm curious what you think of this design... At one of my previous companies, I introduced "Feedback Loops". 1️⃣ For Your Company 2️⃣ For Your Manager 3️⃣ For Your Team 4️⃣ For You Feedback Loops were short surveys, one completed each quarter, to provide feedback on the company, their manager, their team, and receive feedback on themselves. We were growing fast - with new teams and projects launched regularly. To continuously fine-tune the way we manage our organization, our people, our teams and ourselves, we needed ongoing improvement - without the massive disruption! 🙂 Questions were sourced from several surveys and individual and manager effectiveness measures. We also looked at companies that had done extensive research in this area and added questions specific to our company. 𝐒𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬: We wanted to avoid pitfalls of 'traditional reviews processes' that are often marred by forced rankings and distribution curves: 🎭 𝐀𝐧𝐨𝐧𝐲𝐦𝐨𝐮𝐬; except 'Feedback For You' done by the person's manager. 🪶 𝐋𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭; designed to do quickly, minimising disruption to work. 🌅 𝐒𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧-𝐅𝐨𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝; forward looking – avoid feeling stuck in past. 𝐅𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐋𝐨𝐨𝐩𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐥: See samples below. 1️⃣ 𝐅𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐲 ⏱️15 mins Similarly to the engagement survey you may have filled out in the past, you will receive questions about working at the Company. Sample questions: ☑️ I feel I have a good work-life balance. ☑️ I'm proud to work here. 2️⃣ 𝐅𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐫 ⏱️15 mins Management is a skill, and we all have things we can improve upon. This survey will ask you a series of (anonymous) questions about your manager, which will help them develop as leaders. Sample questions: ☑️ My manager makes time for one-on-one meetings with me at least every other week. ☑️ My manager has useful technical knowledge to help our team succeed. 3️⃣ 𝐅𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐦. ⏱️15 mins An opportunity to provide feedback on the things your team does well and where it can improve. ❗️Selected stakeholders 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 were also asked to answer some of these questions. Sample questions: ☑️ Our team has clear objectives ☑️ Our team delivers high quality output 3️⃣ 𝐅𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐘𝐨𝐮. ⏱️20 mins Your manager and colleagues will provide feedback on how you are tracking and highlight any key progress and areas for improvement. Sample questions: ☑️ Can the person “argue” constructively with others? ☑️ What is the person's greatest strength that adds value to the team? ---- Do you do anything similar? Any other cool Performance Review Designs? #momentsthatmatter #employeeexperience #exdesign

✨ New resource: a PM Performance Evaluation template Throughout my 15+ years as a PM, I’ve consistently felt that ladder-based PM performance evaluations seem broken, but I couldn’t quite find the words to describe why. Early on in my PM career, I was actually part of the problem — I happily created or co-created elaborate PM ladders in spreadsheets, calling out all sorts of nuances between what “Product Quality focus” looks like at the PM3 level vs. at the Sr. PM level. (looking back, it was a non-trivial amount of nonsense — and having seen several dozens of ladder spreadsheets at this point, I can confidently say this is the case for >90% of such ladder spreadsheets) So that led me to develop the Insight-Execution-Impact framework for PM Performance Evaluations, which you can see in the picture below. I then used this framework informally to guide performance conversations and performance feedback for PMs on my team at Stripe — and I have also shared this with a dozen founders who’ve adapted it for their own performance evaluations as they have established more formal performance systems at their startups. And now, you can access this framework as an easy to update & copy Coda doc (link in the comments). How to use this template as a manager? In a small company that hasn’t yet created the standard mess of elaborate spreadsheet-based career ladders, you might consider adopting this template as your standard way of evaluating and communication PM performance (and you can marry it with other sane frameworks such as PSHE by Shishir Mehrotra to decide when to promote a given PM to the next level e.g. GPM vs. Director vs. VP). In a larger company that already has a lot of legacy, habits, and tools around career ladders & perf, you might not be able to wholesale replace your existing system & tools like Workday. That is fine. If this framework resonates with you, I’d still recommend that you use it to actually have meaningful conversations with your team members around planning what to expect over the next 3 / 6 / 9 months and also to provide more meaningful context on their performance & rating. When I was at Stripe, we used Workday as our performance review tool, but I first wrote my feedback in the form of Insight - Execution - Impact (privately) and then pasted the relevant parts of my write-up into Workday. So that’s it from me. Again, the link to the template is in the comments. And if you want more of your colleagues to see the light, there’s even a video in that doc, in which I explain the problem and the core framework in more detail. I hope this is useful.

Disclaimer: Long post on performance reviews I put a lot of time and effort on performance reviews. I’m going to share how I do them at Rippling, so you can (hopefully) apply some of it. 1️⃣ Before we start, these are the Must haves to achieve successful reviews:  ✍️ A rubric. You won’t be able to assess people (or yourself) without one. You can probably reuse engineering career ladders with a few adjustments for the security engineering org to capture well project and operational work.   👫 Safe environment. It’s not possible to have discussions about anyone's career without trust. There will be situations where there is disagreement, so having both manager and report comfortably pushing back is key to achieve a positive outcome.  💫 Desire. Career conversations are difficult at times, you and your report need to be bought in and committed. I’ve been in conversations where my report wasn’t engaged and didn’t feel strongly about the need for performance reviews. Unsurprisingly, the conversations didn’t go well and they created more division between me and my report. Before you have career conversations, you need to make sure your reports want to have that discussion. 2️⃣ How I do performance reviews:  📆 Cadence: I set up a one hour block with my report every 8 weeks to add the evidence they’ve collected over the last 8 weeks to each one of the sections of the career ladder.  👷 Preparation: I ask my report to add the evidence beforehand to the career ladder spreadsheet, so we can have discussions on the things achieved and where that puts them. The first few times, I also allocate time to prepare for this meeting, so I can contribute from my perspective.  🧑🏫 How do I rate: For each of the sections on the career ladder, we use 3 colors: Purple (No evidence), Yellow (In progress, need to gather more evidence), Green (Is consistently delivering on this area). Depending on the evidence gathered over time we’d color each one of the sections accordingly. See image attached. The goal of performance reviews is also to see progression over time, that is, trending to green.  🏅 Performance assessment: Based on the time the person has been on the role + the colours and evidence added to the career ladder rubric, you can assess a person in an fairly unbiased manner. In addition, you already have gathered evidence over time to discuss with senior leaders how each one of your reports is performing and what is the evidence you have to back your claims.