
Goldman Sachs Introduces Real-Time Employee Performance Reviews - danso
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-21/goldman-sachs-introduces-real-time-employee-performance-reviews
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crispyambulance
Come on, it's yet another HR bullshit vehicle to suck away time and good-will.

Any happy, healthy and productive working group with a manager and directs
enjoys an environment where feedback is "realtime" and context sensitive. It
has been this way since the dawn of modern workplaces. People got stuff done
and companies flourished even without HR-driven company-wide "reviews".

HR departments, unfortunately, aren't satisfied with the annual hoop-jumping
exercise that everyone hates but finishes in haste to get it over with. The
fashion now is to drag out this process over the whole year. Instead of you
and your boss having to "prove" your worth once a year to HR, you now have to
do it several times a year, tracked and nagged by a "realtime" system. Goldman
Sachs isn't the only company doing this stuff, it's all over the place, sadly.

For once, I would like to see large companies take a step back and reduce the
burden of these stupid reviews, but it has only been getting worse and more
annoying.

~~~
lefstathiou
I respectfully disagree here. Having worked in the industry for many years
(now at a startup) the review process was deeply flawed. Because it happened
once a year and your bonus was tied to it people always erred on the side of
providing 100% positive and thus superficial feedback. There wasn't a
mechanism to know where you really stood and how you could get better. I'm not
saying this is the solution in itself but the current low touch twice a year
process which is minimally invasive is a disaster in my opinion. I think this
solution has merit as it takes a page out of Ryan Dalio's Principles which is
to shorten the feedback loop as quickly and as much as possible.

What I think would be interesting is to see behaviorial benchmarks for
employees that are auto tracked. I sat next to kids that always printed 5+
extra color copies of 100 page presentations just in case. That could cost the
desk 20k over the course of the year. banks have no way of knowing if
employees are going out of their way to be efficient, save costs, or be
productive other than subjective year end measures. bottom line is as someone
in the industry I think this is a positive step forward and wanted to throw
that in the mix for consideration.

~~~
AcerbicZero
I can respect your experience, and in fact it mirrors mine, in that any review
process invented by HR inevitably becomes a broken, gamed system, with limited
value.

Where it seems we disagree is on the solution. I don't think adding an even
more burdensome artificial review system will fix what is still the same
review process, just sped up. They've missed the entire human aspect of how
immediate feedback is used/interperted, i.e. how a manager can correct a poor
attitude or a deficiency without turning it into an everlasting stigma. As
much as HR would like to pretend otherwise, good management is a skill and
requires some basic human interaction talent to do correctly.

This will be another failed HR initiative within a year or two, at best. At
worst, it'll turn into an episode of Black Mirror. ->
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive)

~~~
user5994461
The solution is to game the system to advance your career.

That's how it always worked.

~~~
venture_lol
Successful "gaming" and "advancing your career" means you have figured out how
to work the organization to achieve objectives...that means you know when you
are a go-getter, a driver, a supporter, a smoother, a leader :)

~~~
AstralStorm
Yes sure, if they actually put in real useful targets in there. But typically
they don't. (Even if they on paper might look the part.)

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cs702
The obvious next step is to create a real-time market for employee performance
reviews, allowing employees to bet on and against their and other employees'
performance reviews and possibly even trade derivatives priced based on
baskets of rising or falling performance reviews.

There would be many benefits. For starters, having a liquid, efficient market
for performance reviews in which employees are able to bet on each others'
reviews with minimal frictional costs would unleash market forces that would
keep the performance reviews accurate (right?). But the really big payoff
would come down the road, when this market could be opened to external
investors like the venerable firm that manages your Aunt Tilly's pension plan,
generating new sources of trading revenues for Goldman.

In all seriousness, I'm not sure real-time performance reviews are a good
idea. They immediately bring to mind the societal nightmare of Black Mirror's
"Nose Dive" episode: [http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/13379204/black-
mirror-sea...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/13379204/black-mirror-
season-3-episode-1-nosedive-recap)

~~~
AstralStorm
People cannot bet on what they don't know. This is how all markets are really
inefficient.

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basseq
I'm unclear if this _replaces_ in any way their existing (annual?) performance
review process. Employees _do_ request immediate feedback: it's a major "best
practice" and a very common performance improvement area.

Now, usually this takes the form of _just talking to your direct reports_ when
you see them do something good or bad. I haven't seen an institutionalized _IT
system_ that would do this, nor that those micro-interactions would somehow
"add up" to a full performance appraisal.

So this seems to add more friction to giving feedback: never a good thing. And
refer also to the whole Amazon "Anytime Feedback" peer feedback tool that
turned into political posturing and back-stabbing.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-
reportedly-s...](http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-reportedly-
slam-each-other-through-this-internal-review-tool-2015-8)

~~~
zzalpha
My guess is it supplements. Ultimately the person managing an employee's
development still has to be involved in coaching and formal evaluation. 360s
provide data points as well as an opportunity for ongoing improvement rather
than saving it all for a once-a-year feedback loop.

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pcurve
I think it's fair that employees are given regular feedback throughout the
year, instead of it be withheld until evaluation time and not have
opportunities to correct.

I think it's also fair that the feedback mechanism is bi-directional.

However, what concerns me about this is, managers with lower-performing
employees may get dinged harsher than managers with top performers.

In large companies with many teams, this will require a bit of digging to
uncover this factor. What is manager's recourse without looking like he or she
is throwing his/her team members under the bus?

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wsgeek
Very Bridgewater-eque

...and the employees "wanted" this? I doubt it.

Seriously, did I misinterpret this? Not trying to be a troll.

~~~
ordinaryperson
Imagine thinking you did a good job all year, only to hear in your review
everyone hates your guts -- and you had no idea.

If the critique is fair, timely feedback also gives you a chance to change
instead of letting it build up until they hate you. Imagine your wife/husband
told you they always hated your cooking. Why not tell me before instead of
while we're divorcing?

If you're guaranteed to get feedback, it's always better delivered in a timely
fashion.

~~~
sheepmullet
> Imagine thinking you did a good job all year, only to hear in your review
> everyone hates your guts -- and you had no idea.

Imagine you talk to your manager and coworkers regularly to get feedback but
you don't put the negative feedback into a formal software system that
encourages politics and backstabbing!

~~~
zzalpha
Why on earth do you believe a formal system would make backstabbing and
politics worse?

I'd argue it has the potential to make it better since it creates a papertrail
and transparency. I'd rather that than Joe Angry Developer sneakily
badmouthing me to my boss or my co-workers behind my back.

Worst case it seems like a lateral move as far as politics goes.

~~~
sheepmullet
You have changed from a system where small complaints are usually handled
between individuals to a system where people are encouraged to report
complaints into a long lived formal system that can be viewed by the
management chain as well as by HR.

How would you respond if I file a HR complaint about you or send a complaint
to your manager?

Better than if we had just had a quiet word?

Or now rather than blowing off steam by complaining to another colleague that
e.g. you don't want to delegate your co-worker will formally report it into a
system used to manage compensation and career progression.

Others will game the system and make sure people write lots of positive
comments about them. Now when it comes to the next pay cycle I have dozens of
positive comments and you have a couple of positives and a few negatives.
Guess how that will work out for you?

It encourages people to complain in the heat of the moment.

Etc etc etc.

Not to mention that people who want to badmouth you behind your back still
will.

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brianwillis
My employer tried and failed using a similar system with Salesforce Work.com.
It all seemed a bit pointless and forced to me. In the early days of using it
while it was still a novelty, managers were giving feedback to people so that
they could demonstrate to HR that they were being good little soldiers by
using the tool, rather than because they wanted to praise good performance.
This insincere praise was worse than no feedback at all.

In the end, it never really went anywhere because it became another inbox to
check, and we already have too many of those. A chicken-and-egg problem also
presented itself, where people only checked the site when they got a
notification saying they'd received feedback, which led to no-one visiting the
site to give feedback.

~~~
davidlee1435
If you don't mind me asking, what did you guys fall back to, and were you guys
satisfied with it?

~~~
mythrwy
It's a terrible idea. Please don't even think about building it.

As another poster mentioned real time feedback between team members and
leaders happens organically (if the people are any good). The HR annual or bi-
annual review is a formalization and documentation step but I can't imagine
usually leads to better performance.

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davidlee1435
I think (and maybe this is a flawed premise) that most folks desire genuine,
helpful feedback (or perhaps more generally what other people think about
them). However, it seems like folks have difficulty when being on the giving
end of the feedback, which makes tools for real-time feedback a one-sided
marketplace. I could hypothesize a few reasons (i.e, feedback taken the wrong
way could damage interpersonal relationships, feedback is awkward to give to a
colleague, feedback is based on a sliver of the full-picture of an employee's
performance, etc.), but I'd like to know y'all's opinions on the matter.

What seems to be a part of the problem is also how nebulous workplace
interactions are when administrated by HR. It's awkward and unnatural to ask a
close friend to "describe something that <other close friend> has done well."
Most of the time when I give feedback about someone, it's a reaction to
something that that person did that I observed. Having such an open-ended
review in annual performance reviews seems to create a breeding ground for
feedback that isn't helpful, and asking those questions constantly like
Goldman and a lot of other companies are trying to do serves only to
exacerbate the problem.

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danso
The article makes it sound better than what immediately popped into my head,
which was employee performance via metrics shown on a Chartbeat-like animated
dashboard. Sadly, some media companies are indeed mesmerized by watching
article performance via Chartbeat's real-time traffic charts.

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throw2016
One would think HR would be against something that introduces constant stress
in the workforce rather than introduce it.

It comes across as a company obsessed with getting the maximum possible output
from their workforce like from a machine but quite not sure how to pull it off
from human beings.

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anon263626
They're crooks whom subvert democracy and exploit people and businesses with
obsfucated trickery. Who cares? Next financial crisis brought closer because
coworker competition in performance reviews means legitimized stealing even
more money, faster.

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pasbesoin
"Dashboard"

Danger! Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!

Pardon my ingrained reaction to the Christmas tree metrics.

When I was back in corporate land, real, ongoing feedback and a _real
conversation_ would have been useful. But, it all came down to the yearly
ritual and basically fitting people into the slots (including pay increases /
pre-defined budget) that were available.

Maybe Goldman Sachs will come up with something else, but with respect to
"real time" reviews, I can't help thinking of the old expression:

"What have you done for me, lately?"

On the other hand, to re-introduce the sarcasm, it couldn't happen to a nicer
group of people.

~~~
davidlee1435
I've never been through a performance review before (currently a college
student), but I'm curious: what distinguishes a good conversation about your
performance from a bad conversation? Do you receive a plan of action? Is it
the way that the conversation is conducted?

~~~
pasbesoin
There are many things that could be said, I guess, but a good and concise
summary would be, "Trust your gut reaction."

If/When you get into such meetings, if you feel uncomfortable -- not that you
have goals to meet, but with respect to the natures of the goals,
measurements, and feedback, itself -- trust your reaction.

In my corporate experience, all of this ultimately goes to serve Human
Resources (HR). And, contrary to the impression some newer employees can have
and that HR itself often fosters, HR _DOES NOT_ serve the interest of the
employee. They are there solely to staff _and to protect_ the organization.

Much of the performance review process serves to produce documentation they
can subsequently use to justify whatever action they decide to take. Note that
such actions may not actually correspond or respond to your real performance.

Hopefully, you'll end up with a good manager that will help you grow and
understand the system. But, that _is your direct management._ THAT is the
critical decision.

I had one manager who was like that. Things were good, until they early-
retired him out. I basically consolidated the work of a 5 department team down
to one person -- me -- as we continued to go through layoffs. Done in
substantially less time and with substantially less errors, more flexibility,
and a complete change-over, with much greater complexity and variability, in
the underlying data.

I received an award. And another time, that manager, before he was retired
out, just showed up at my desk one day with an unsolicited 12% raise, because
"I was doing the work." In the midst of a company-wide pay freeze.

But when they were done with me, I received a very cold stare from our HR
manager as I passed her in the hall one day, and the next I was out.

Trust your gut. Not any "performance review" process. You need to respond to
and manage the process, as it unfolds. But you trust your gut.

P.S. Yes, I should have gotten out a lot sooner. I had basically become a
"workaholic" to avoid a lousy home circumstance and personal life. Another
lesson to learn and avoid.

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biocomputation
Don't see how something like this will be good for morale, but I suppose
that's what the enormous bonuses are for.

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mnglkhn2
It is a result of a test driven education system. Young people want feedback
more often to feel secure in their actions.

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dannyr
It's like to Twitter but for Performance Reviews.

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sgt101
Yes! Because this has worked so well in politics and on the internet.

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uncensored
Haven't they learned from history?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y#Theory_X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y#Theory_X)

