Performance Reviews

Performance reviews are a bizarre, sadomasochistic exercise with all the hallmarks of a cult ritual: The Catch-22 and original sin, the self-flagellation and atonement and a promise to do better in return for the grace of the corporate clergy.

A performance review should be an easy exercise to complete, but since the administrators in charge of filing your paperwork finally have something relatively tangible to do, they have to overcomplicate it by all sorts of frameworks and introspection bullshit. Thus, it cannot be a simple “Did you do your job” box to tick. Instead, it has to be a dive into your deepest self, an exploration of the pseudo-profundities of the job and what it means to you and how your commitment to it manifests itself in the coffers of the company. This ritual can take hours to complete, and at the end of it, you may feel like you’ve just had the displeasure of watching an arthouse film by a director who just wants the audience to ask him what it all means.

You have to prepare for a performance review. Not in the sense of psychologically preparing for a public speech or a sports competition, but by writing down some thoughts of your own to guide the conversation. The most important part of this preparation has to be about your failures as an employee. Sometimes it can be enough to give the old “I could do better at communicating with my colleagues”, but sometimes they need you to do the blood ritual, and it has to cut deep. Failing to identify a failure is the worst offence, and should you fail at it, they will expect you to be better at it in your next review, provided you still have a job, since failing to identify a failure is not only your failure, it’s also a failure on your manager’s part, and sometimes the punishment is collective.

The liturgy is provided by the condescending sandwich model. The nutritional analogy ironically being that whatever you have done right during the past year is comparable to overprocessed empty calories packed into stale bread, whereas the meat, all the juicy bits, are where you are a failure.

Once you have sufficiently apologized for the original sin of being gainfully employed, it is time to atone. A promise to do better and a groveling “thank you, may I have another?” gives you another year’s respite from the mental anguish, and you can go back to doing your job well and to the satisfaction of all parties involved. With the ritual completed, HR can record your failures and your promises and the corporate clergy gives the all clear, while they move the inquisition on to the next person.