Performance Reviews: An Exercise in Conformity

It's Q1 in the white collar world: 'Tis the season to be dreaded.

January brings with it an end to the holiday cheer and the start to the weekly reminders on performance reviews. A double whammy. Workers reluctantly shrug off the cobwebs of Christmas, and reluctantly listen in on meetings, and then agree to spend hours filling out performance surveys with a reluctant resolve.

Performance reviews have been around in some form or other for a hundred or so years, ever since the start of the industrial age and colonization. In the west, Factory workers were monitored by overseers, overseers were overseen by factory owners, and the factory owners were in turn owned by profit margins. In colonized lands and indigo farms; within tea, coffee and cotton plantations, there was a strict and often inhumane treatment of indentured laborers. Workers were weighed down under the gazes of their overlords, while the culture of 40-60hr workweeks and micro-management of workers took root all over the world.

Performance Reviews, in their current avatar, can be traced to the principles of “Scientific Management“ that were expounded by a Frederick W. Taylor in the early 20th century. This man was a mechanical engineer turned consultant who preferred to view humans the same as machines. He would time workers with stopwatches, place bets on how much weight a strong average male can carry, and dare iron workers into pushing themselves beyond their limits.

He was the first one to put a heavy emphasis on “productivity“. Taylor loved to make up an ideal worker, give him all kinds of wonderful attributes, and then expect corporeal individuals to keep pace with his michelin man. (Though there were plenty of women on the factory floor, Taylor preferred to talk to and about “men“.) As you can imagine, he was welcomed with open arms by capitalists and scorned with equal fervor by the workers.

Taylor hovering over a young worker’s shoulder with a stopwatch. Source: Museum of the Moving Image.

Taylor benefited from being at the right place at the right time. The stress and scarcity brought on by the World Wars ramped up industrial productions to new heights. He was invited to factories around the US to act as a highly paid consultant and watch workers do their jobs for a day or two. He would then promptly proceed to tell them how to do it better. He was so popular that his talks and teachings on worker control and subsequent profit making ended up becoming the very course Harvard Business School was built on.

(And thus the modern MBA was born.)

Meanwhile, though Taylor was often fired from his roles and his techniques never showed much lasting benefit, his story of scientific management lived to endure through the last century. His tales of worker management, easy peasy steps to profitability and emphasis on the importance of managers proved to be too powerful a lure. He was the first to measure how long a worker was at their “desk“, how long their eyes stayed on task, how short their breaks were, and how well they have conformed to the myth of the “Organization Man.“

Unfortunately, he was not the last.

We now find ourselves monitored in a myriad of ways that would have made Taylor proud. Our screen time is tracked, the number of clicks on our keyboards captured, our sick days questioned, and the time we take to go from “AKF“ to “I’m back“ carefully measured.

Since mid-2023, Amazon and Google have been cracking down on worker attendance by counting badge swipes in an attempt to enforce their return-to-office mandates. Emails are sent out to employees who don’t adhere. The badge reviews occur more frequently than project reviews. In response, one ex-Amazon employee decided to work remote during the day and drive in to the office at night just to swipe his badge. A way to beat both the traffic and the increasingly threatening emails.

A hilarious reply on a reddit thread.

The on-going shift in the tech market from employee to employers has emboldened several of these corporations into making brasher moves. Amazon is throwing workers at random into “Focus“, a program meant to educate and improve a person’s productivity, but is in reality the first of their lethal weapons of intimidation. If the person doesn’t “improve”, they are then shepherded into “PIP” a.k.a. “performance improvement plan“ a.k.a. the surest step to induced attrition.

Current and former employees recount countless PIP-based horror stories with the same whisper of dread and disbelief one may use to recall an actual tale of horror. Most PIPs follow the same plot: manager starts to grow cold and distant, starts communicating via “written“ media, holds a performance review announcing his decision, announces lofty goals and impossible deadlines, forces the worker to finally quit out of frustration, and then the company doesn’t have to report any more severance related restructuring costs on its balance sheet.

This year, the rumor mills state that many more employees have been thrust into “FOCUS“ and “PIPs“ as natural attrition rates have dropped to historic lows. In 2024, an employee may be placed in these programs for any number of reasons: facing a drop in productivity, being the newest member of the team, being the oldest member of the team, wishing to attend their sister’s wedding, or daring to grieve a loved one¹.

Several companies are utilizing this tactic from FAANGs to start-ups. After all, the best way to fire an employee is to make them quit. One mid-sized company with 500+ employees used performance evaluations as an excuse to let go of THREE employees and then called it a layoff².

A wise and strategic use of the surrounding “macro-economic“ trends.

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Within the past decade, companies that promise to monitor worker productivity have proliferated and spread without control. They arm themselves with benign names like HubStaff, ActivTrak, TeraMind and Time Doctor. If you’ve never heard of them, believe me, that’s to their benefit. It’s surveillance technology at its finest and where does all the collected data go? To the managers and the performance reviews of course.

At the same time, performance reviews are being viewed with more fear than ever. Pre-2022 these meetings served as a platform to ask for a raise and gain some feedback. Post-2022 they serve as a means to prove why one should not be fired.

Who really benefits from the lengthy rigmarole of Performance Reviews? Not the worker, that's for sure.

Performance reviews take up time, resources, energy and place workers on stress-filled roller coasters. But even middle managers, the ones who perform the bulk of the evaluations, are unsure as to what benefit they hold. In tech, many of these managers lack the know-how to understand exactly what their employee is going through or to even know what they are doing on a weekly basis. And so, to measure performance these managers fall back on biased³ metrics, monitoring software, and Jira ticket completion rates. Not to mention the iffy peer evaluations which serve up office gossip and personality based likes/dislikes by the mouthfuls.

In my own experience, performance reviews have been less than ideal. At my first one, I was offered a paltry 2.5% raise (inflation at >5%), my second one I was stereotyped and told to be “assertive”, third was skipped due to covid, and my final one turned out to be the best one I ever had. Of course, I was laid off just two months later. But at least, I was a star performer once?

In a 2019 Gallup survey, only 14% of American employees said that performance reviews help. That number must have dipped lower by now. The good news is that some companies are moving away from this circus. They are catching on that the emphasis on increasing productivity is in itself a feeble myth at this point when wages have stagnated and “productivity“ is through the roof.

Moreover, amidst the uncertainty of the current labor market, performance reviews have transfigured further into a chimera. If you’re an employer, maybe its time to rethink how to provide useful critiques instead of weaponizing the very mechanisms for feedback.

And if you’re an employee, it’s time to watch out for any warning signs. Or written communications. If they are forcing you to quit, its better to stay, get severance, and find another job within that time period. But in this market, of course, workers do not even have the ability to move on to other jobs. Many an employee is working harder, faster, longer, while coasting anxiously along the edges of burnout as they wait for the shoe to drop.

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PS: Never tell your manager what you actually think they can do better. It’s a 360-feedback only in name! Beware!

1. All true stories, shared with me by various members of the white collar workforce.

2. The WARN ACT’s definition of a mass layoff requires 33% of the workforce.

3. Performance Evals are notoriously biased against women and other minorities.