Performance Review Process

This post is with reference to an article that was posted today on Reddif.com (LINK: http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/feb/05tcs.htm)

I worked for about 5 years at one of the top Indian IT companies. It was my first job and I had some good times and some bad times. I had some good annual reveiws and some pretty poor ones, and I count myself lucky as I am not one of those 500 who were unlucky enough to be asked to leave their jobs - who knows how close I / we, or someone I / we know, may have come to being handed this fate.

I have now worked for a couple of firms (one an Investment Bank and another an Asset Management firm) since leaving the Indian IT firm in 2005. This has allowed me the opportunity to experience a few differennt approaches to performance reviews. I feel that there is a huge gap in the performance review process between the Investment Bank / Asset Management firm and the Indian IT firm. Reading through peoples comments on the article kind of makes me sad. One can only hope that this attitude to performance review is an exception rather than a rule. I can vouch that some of them are actually true having personally experienced them in my early days.

Looking back at my days with the Indian IT firm, I feel that there was a tendency to take a 'Master Ji' kind of an approach to performance review. i.e. I have given you a job to do and I will take a 'judgemental' viewpoint and rate you on the same. That's probably not the best way to approach it.

Humans are not uni-dimensional characters. Hence any review cannot and should not be uni-dimensional as well.
It seems to me that the review process has unfortunately eveolved into 'judgement' time whereas it is an opportunity for people to sit back and reflect on what they did, how they did, what they did right, what they did wrong and how could they improve. It's about helping the employee grow so that both he / she and the firm can benefit. It's not about passing a judgement on the employee.

But when you are talking about 1 lakh employees (or resources) it's probably easier to 'rate', than to 'evaluate'. Looks to me that we are taking the easy way out - something that we should do at our own peril.