[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What does performance management look like a...
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Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?
I'm curious to learn about staff performance management at other
companies to understand what works and what doesn't. How does your
company set goals, evaluate performance, etc? Do you use OKRs or a
similar tool? Thanks! Edit: Clarified that I am asking about staff
and employee performance management. Thanks!
Author : edgefield0
Score : 129 points
Date : 2020-09-04 12:33 UTC (10 hours ago)
| JackMorgan wrote:
| I'm eight years into management across two different sized
| companies. Both have ultimately had entirely subjective systems.
|
| I'm currently a director of a twenty person office. My current
| teams are supposed to have stack ranked individuals, so I simply
| give everyone the exact average. I also give everyone the same
| objectives: improve performance with technical debt repayment,
| use retros to determine working agreements and adhere to them,
| adhere to a WIP limit and then help any other team areas when
| there are bottlenecks, do weekly research to keep your skills
| sharp, self organize your team to best meet the business goals,
| help anyone with their job when asked or offer a time when you
| next are free, and if you have no work ask your team for
| something to do. These are pretty easy to meet, so people usually
| do well on them.
|
| Ultimately compensation is tied to the whole product, not the
| employee, since we all split any money evenly.
|
| I find this works exceptionally well at ensuring the ultimate
| goal is team performance, not individual performance.
|
| Team members not pulling their weight are identified and asked to
| find a new job or improve. The ones that don't are given low
| ratings and let go.
|
| In all it allows us to have a very stable team of high
| performers. Our average tenure is over seven years. No one has
| any incentive at all to "beat" everyone else. I've found the
| teams that employ such tactics never have long lasting talent
| anyway, just a string of "heroes" who burn out after a few years.
|
| Also I flush this out with a regular "salary review" where I try
| to ensure everyone is paid fair market rate for their job. This
| happens maybe every 18 months or so for new grads, and less
| frequently as people get closer to salary ceilings for our
| location.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Survival of the fittest: after being at the lowest 10% for three
| of five years, you get washed out
| candiddevmike wrote:
| In most companies I've worked in: thinly veiled nepotism and
| cronyism. I've never seen the inputs of a performance management
| tool being the only inputs for calculating merit or bonus
| amounts, so the outcomes of both these situations depends heavily
| on your relationship with your boss and their boss.
|
| Don't get me started on stack ranking or making sure everyone
| "fits the curve" by knocking down everyone to average because HR
| said so.
| anonymous1111 wrote:
| > thinly veiled nepotism and cronyism
|
| Exactly my experience as well, but it's often not even thinly
| veiled.
|
| These processes should not even be referred to as "performance"
| reviews since they often have little or nothing to do with
| performance. It's loaded and deceptive language.
| poof_he_is_gone wrote:
| I work for a company that makes performance management and
| recognition and rewards software. As such, it is deeply embedded
| in our culture. We have a mix of tools that enable goals/OKRs,
| 1:1s, feedback, structured performance reviews, and 9-box
| evaluations. I lead product design for the company, and part of
| the reason I took the job was being able to deep dive into the
| user experience of how this works, and ultimately improve my own
| management skills. The process of rebuilding, testing, and
| developing the tools has exposed me to some top brass HR folks at
| large companies. It has been awesome being able to get the
| perspective on what works for individuals, and what outcomes
| people are expecting at the company level. I really feel like I
| have grown significantly as a manager in my time here.
|
| At our company Goals/OKRs are set at the individual, department,
| and company level. You can align your goals up, or set individual
| (personal growth) goals. These can/should be reviewed in your
| weekly 1:1s with your manager. We allow anyone to send
| recognition, or send or request feedback at any point. We have
| several templates that facilitate different feedback types. We do
| quarterly Check-Ins which is more of a top down performance
| review where you can reflect on goal progress, feedback, and next
| steps with your manager. The 9-box talent assessment is
| calibrated for each employee twice a year. We also facilitate
| surveys at the company level to help do things like eNPS scores.
| If you want to learn more, ask away or check us out at
| https://www.kazoohr.com/
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| What size is your company/team?
|
| Different strategies perform well depending on size. For example,
| most of the time I find OKRs a little excessive for a small team.
|
| Have you identified KPIs? What are they?
|
| "What's measured is managed," said Drucker. Personally, finding
| what exactly to measure is difficult. So don't be afraid to spend
| a lot of time figuring this out. When you do, all the other
| performance management strategies will somehow find a way to work
| towards your goals.
| argiopetech wrote:
| Drucker never actually said that, though it's been attributed
| to him frequently. I found this blog interesting, and they link
| to the Drucker Institute if you'd like something more
| authoritative.
|
| https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/what-gets-measur...
|
| Similar quotes are often attributed to Deming. He never make
| this claim either.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| I suppose I confused this with "Know Thy Time" in Effective
| Executive. Thanks for clarifying, I'm sure I've incorrectly
| made this attribution before.
|
| Edit: typo
| irjustin wrote:
| > I find OKRs a little excessive for a small team
|
| Can you explain this one a bit more? Are there specific
| pitfalls of the OKR system that don't work well for small
| teams?
|
| Is it purely a size of the organization as a whole? i.e. If the
| whole company is <10 OKRs don't work. Or is it inclusive of
| team size? Any group/unit of <10 should not use OKRs, too
| single metric heavy.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| For context, my understanding of OKRs is limited to the
| reading of "Measure what Matters."
|
| In my understanding, OKRs are dependent on organizational
| clarity of the mission, vision, and metrics.
|
| Now I'm sure there are plenty of teams that have matured in
| their space and have this organizational clarity.
|
| But when I was referring to small teams, it was in the
| context of "we're small now, but if we make this work, we'll
| be bigger."
|
| In the latter, decisions are going to be more bite-sized. And
| going through the OKR exercise could take as much time as the
| execution of the tasks.
|
| Edit: in other words, OKRs are great for well-defined
| outcomes, where the time required is longer than what would
| be expected from an individual contributor during a week-long
| sprint.
| tomxor wrote:
| > What size is your company/team? Different strategies perform
| well depending on size.
|
| I can't emphasis how important this advice is in general - Use
| it to validate everything you read about, especially on HN.
|
| If you work in a small organisation or team (the ones that
| don't make lots of noise) then most of the advice out there,
| from technology choices to management choices, are going to be
| biased against your size, some of those choices are the direct
| opposite depending on size.
| renewiltord wrote:
| We used Google Sheets. Honestly, it appeared that culture was
| more important than tooling here.
| cbanek wrote:
| It's all honestly completely useless. I've never had a useful
| performance review at any company ever. It's either I'm doing
| bad, and know it, and that is either my fault or due to reasons
| outside of my control. Or I'm doing well, and know it. Honestly,
| sometimes at places things were so bad that I felt I was doing
| terrible, but I was actually keeping the team going by pushing
| past a lot of tricky issues.
|
| Really I think any company that waits until performance review
| time is really broken. That could be a year, or sometimes many
| years.
|
| Also, the usefulness or performance management is usually
| undermined by the fact that the people doing the worst usually
| are in hardcore denial as to their performance. Those people are
| the hardest to change and manage. I've rarely seen performance
| management actually fix a problem, other than making the
| environment so unpalatable that the person just leaves.
|
| I really wish I could have all that time wasted on writing
| useless "self-reviews" back. Even if I was staring at a blank
| wall it'd be time better spent.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This is sad, when I read it I think, "This person has never had
| an actual manager, just people faking it badly."
|
| That said, it isn't too unusual in my experience because people
| who are good engineers usually get told "you should go into
| management if you want to keep advancing" but they don't tell
| them "Oh, and this is a _completely_ different job than you
| have been doing and none of your skills will apply, kthxbye! "
|
| For a long time in my career I didn't want to be a manager
| because I didn't trust myself to manage well. And it took a
| really bad manager at Google to educate me on what the job of a
| good manager is. I stumbled around a bit but figured out that
| there are two things a manager must do to be successful; first
| is to communicate with their team what is expected of them and
| how that expectation will be measured, and second is to listen
| to what their employees say to them.
|
| Sounds kind of simple but it's actually kind of hard to get
| right.
|
| Performance management is drilling down into understanding what
| is going on with the person who is failing to meet their
| expectations.
|
| If you both understand the metric for measurement, whether it
| is lines of code or time to delivery or what ever you have
| worked out with the employee ahead of time, both of you have to
| look at the metric, and the action to date, and get to a common
| understanding of what is going "wrong."
|
| The most common problem I have dealt with are people who claim
| to be "senior" from a large company but don't really have any
| idea what that means other than "time spent in the role." I
| have pretty qualitative definitions of "entry level",
| "experienced", and "senior" that I work from and right away I
| try to communicate that to an employee. Sometimes they get
| hired into a role that is "above" them and they are unable to
| rise to the challenge, sometimes its just a different work flow
| than they have been used to.
|
| The second most common problem is ego. An engineer who defines
| themselves by how good of an engineer they are, has a really
| really hard time looking critically at their own weaknesses.
| That conversation usually has a lot of "this doesn't mean you
| are a bad engineer, it means we have to work out how you can be
| even better than you currently are." type discussions.
|
| The third one that comes up are people who are doing the job
| because someone else (spouse, parent, peer) thinks "it's a good
| job, you should be a ..." rather than the job they _really_
| want to do. As a result they put in only enough effort to not
| get fired and not much more. I 'm okay with that if they don't
| mind being paid at the entry level wage level. If they are in
| the mindset that "I've got five years of experience and
| <reference> says I should be making $Y at this point." Then we
| have the conversation about "careers" versus "jobs". There are
| plenty of people who just want a paycheck and will do the
| minimum for it. They do fine work and clock in the hours, but
| they don't add value to the team like someone who wants to be
| _good_ at what they are doing.
|
| Too many engineering managers try to treat engineers as cogs
| with the only power of "do it or I will fire you" to motivate
| them. From my limited experience with this type of management
| it only works so much, and it doesn't build teams, or good
| product in the long term.
| brightball wrote:
| If you're ever in a SAFe team, one of the tenants is that
| annual reviews are useless. It pushes for doing constructive
| reviews every PI (approximately quarterly).
| brtkdotse wrote:
| On the other hand, you're in a company doing SAFe so you have
| plenty of opportunity to stare at a wall.
| pc86 wrote:
| I've never been on a SAFe team so maybe this is addressed in
| that methodology, but I think annual reviews are more a tool
| to pass your performance up to higher levels in a structured
| manner as opposed to letting you or your boss know how you're
| doing. Like the GP said, the manager and their direct
| typically know exactly how they're doing, or at least more or
| less where they fall on the spectrum of the team. Ideally
| stand ups should give daily feedback to everyone when someone
| starts to fall behind, and managers should be giving their
| directs feedback often (not necessarily daily).
| jdmichal wrote:
| Yes, exactly this. What I tell my directs when they write
| their reviews is two things. The lesser one is that I'm a
| human and I don't remember all the awesome stuff that
| everyone does through a whole year. So now is the chance to
| remind me of it.
|
| Secondly, and more relevantly and importantly, I'm about to
| walk into a shooting match to defend my employees'
| performances against a larger pool. And what I need in that
| battle are bullets. The more bullets I have, the more
| successful I will be. So load up my gun with every single
| bullet you can think of!
| abhorrence wrote:
| Do you make an effort throughout the year to write down
| all the awesome stuff your directs have done?
| jdmichal wrote:
| During our one-on-ones I try to take notes. But I still
| miss things. Visibility is always a problem, and is even
| more binary now with remote working. I have zero chance
| to stumble into awesome things happening. I can either
| already see it happening or I can't.
| sidlls wrote:
| If I'm ever again in a SAFe team, something has gone terribly
| wrong. I won't join a company that uses this practice unless
| I'm very desperate. If a company I'm at adopts it after I've
| joined I will immediately begin looking elsewhere.
| brightball wrote:
| Yea, I'm very curious to hear more about this.
|
| I've loved it at my company. It seems like development best
| practices + sanity enforcement outside of it and it's
| fairly flexible too (we use kanban instead of scrum).
|
| It's done wonders for putting the planning of how things
| should be implemented into the hands of developers
| themselves and then essentially gets out of the way.
| C1sc0cat wrote:
| Why? reading Wikipedia this seems to be what used to be
| called RAD - done right its Fucking awesome.
|
| One thing is you need 100% collocated experienced people
| who know what they are doing - no third party agencies who
| spend 15 mins discussing pixel separation in photoshop
| mock-ups.
|
| It also not something you'd carelessly throw a junior or an
| intern into
| sidlls wrote:
| SAFe as I've seen and experienced it is a cumbersome,
| process-heavy system. Like most other project management
| systems currently in use in this industry it's probably
| okay if 95% or more of the features are well-known and
| specified clearly. For any non-trivial software
| development work it's a burden. For development touching
| other disciplines (e.g. statistics/ML, new product
| development) it's more like an obstacle.
| brightball wrote:
| It is process heavy outside of the dev flow, but that is
| more business side so it shouldn't affect devs themselves
| much.
|
| It's supposed to be getting out of the way of developers.
| deepaksurti wrote:
| Sorry but what is SAFe? (No pun intended)
| brightball wrote:
| Scaled Agile Framework https://www.scaledagile.com/
| monkeydust wrote:
| I have short 15min weeklies with my team members and then other
| frequent check-in points. By doing this the official review
| process becomes redundant i.e. no surprises in expectation
| mismatches - from my side and team this is a good thing but we
| waste time doing the official stuff.
| funnybeam wrote:
| Good work. This is called management - performance reviews
| are a sop to try and make up for poor management but are
| utterly useless and often counter productive (there's no
| better incentive to start job hunting than having to prepare
| for a performance review)
|
| Competent managers don't need to do performance reviews and
| bad managers are not helped by them
| egberts1 wrote:
| Yet the corporate legal eagles will insist on documentation
| as to bolster their case of such dismissal, if any.
| ghettoimp wrote:
| I've been at $megacorp for a few years. We just completed yet
| another formal, annual review. It would be easy for me to look
| at the process and say it is needlessly structured, time
| consuming, and has never had any surprises.
|
| That said, I once worked for many years at a small company with
| no formal review process at all. At this place, there was
| practically no communication from upper management about how
| they thought you were doing, whether they understood or valued
| your work, what they wanted you to focus on, etc. After years
| of this, I left feeling rather bitter and unappreciated.
|
| For all its flaws, the review process at forces a conversation
| where you get to summarize to higher management what you have
| accomplished and why it is important. Peer-review at least
| gives you a chance to call out outstanding work from your co-
| workers. And the review itself at least gives you a venue to
| hear what management thinks of what you have done.
|
| Anyway, I'd do a lot differently now, if I were back at the old
| place. But on the whole, I think the review process is actually
| a good thing.
| edgefield0 wrote:
| Thanks for this comment. Can you please share more details on
| how the process is structured at your company?
| ghettoimp wrote:
| Sure -- once per year:
|
| - Write up self review. 1-2 pages to highlight what you
| worked on and accomplished, who you helped, why it matters.
| Score yourself on various dimensions of how good of a job
| you are doing (working with others, getting stuff done,
| etc.)
|
| - Nominate 3-4 people to give you peer reviews. Best to
| pick people who can speak to your work, ideally with some
| folks from outside your particular group, and ideally with
| some seniority.
|
| - Managers decide who to ask for peer review about whom.
| You'll get asked by various managers for feedback about
| their reports. Write and submit this feedback -- could be
| as short as a paragraph, more typically 2 or 3 paragraphs:
| what did you work on with them, what did they do achieve,
| what could have gone better? I've probably given feedback
| for 5-10 people on average.
|
| - Manager synthesizes all of this into a report, score you
| on the same dimensions.
|
| - Manager meets with you, gives you their report, goes over
| it with you. There's a lot to this meeting. It's a review
| of how they see your work, a comparison of your self-scores
| and their scores to get on the same page, a discussion of
| noteworthy feedback from others (positive and negative), a
| chance to defend yourself against any negative feedback,
| and a discussion of ideas for addressing any concerns.
| Typically there is also a lot of goal-setting for the
| upcoming year, and more generally a discussion of how
| things are going, how happy you are, and so on.
|
| - Formally acknowledge that you discussed the report with
| your manager (checkbox in some system). This also gives you
| a chance to formally comment on the report, I imagine in
| case of some dispute.
|
| - Followup meeting, some time later, deals with
| compensation adjustments, promotions, etc. This is kept
| separate from the review itself.
|
| Effort level has been perhaps 2-3 days per year for writing
| up all the reviews. I'm sure it's worse for managers.
| temikus wrote:
| Not the OP but sounds like Google's "Perf" process. You can
| take a search through HN and get a couple of accounts.
| Generally; you write how well you did, then you get a
| couple of peers to confirm it and give you feedback. Then
| your manager works with a bunch of other managers to
| "calibrate" to make sure their view of the world is not
| skewed (think you did poorly but you actually did well and
| vice-versa). Then you receive a rating based on that
| calibration.
| httpsterio wrote:
| I don't think that my performance reviews have been a question
| of whether I'm doing a good job or not, it's always been more
| about if the employer agrees that I've spent my time wisely and
| do they appreciate what I'm doing.
|
| In Finnish performance reviews roughly translate to
| "Development discussion" and in my experience that's exactly
| the case as well. I've spent most of the time in my reviews
| talking about my boss about how the company can support me
| better and how I can achieve personal goals (raise, titles etc)
| and what I'd need to do.
| nilkn wrote:
| Here's my slightly unusual take on performance management as a
| manager.
|
| If I'm doing my job well, reviews should mostly feel like a
| formality. They shouldn't take much time from me or from my
| reports.
|
| If I'm doing my job poorly, one signal of that is that a review
| takes a lot of effort. If a performance review takes a lot of
| my time or that of the report receiving the review, it suggests
| there's been some considerable communication breakdown.
| Typically this means the report has been performing poorly,
| doesn't realize it, and I have failed to convey this situation
| to them. More rarely, someone is doing well but I failed and
| made them feel like they were doing poorly.
|
| In this way, I still appreciate the review process. It
| encourages me to confront performance management issues
| continuously throughout the year, and in the worst case that I
| slip up it provides a safeguard that makes sure I eventually do
| get on the right page with the employee.
| nickff wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your insight.
| Decker87 wrote:
| Wow, how very unusual.
| [deleted]
| electricslpnsld wrote:
| I wish I had that kind of insight into my 'performance' pre-
| review! I'm at a FAANG right now and given my interactions with
| my manager alone, I figured I was bombing performance-wise
| (constant complaints about my work, refuses to acknowledge any
| accomplishments, super angry at me during one on ones, assigns
| piles of work that 'need' to be done by Monday on Friday at 6pm
| and then doesn't even acknowledge the completion of the work
| next week, ...). Come performance review time on the other hand
| I've had awesome peer reviews, performance ratings, stock
| refreshes, etc for the past four biannual performance cycles.
| Given the complete mismatch here between how I feel I'm doing
| and how my manager treats me, I'm actually pretty happy we have
| this performance review system in place. Probably just need a
| new manager...
| cbanek wrote:
| As just a random internet person, please, let me agree that
| you need a new manager. Other than yourself, no person has
| more impact on your job, and if you're taking shit and dong
| well, you can do so much better.
|
| Also, never forget that your performance is 'capped' by your
| management chain. While others may see that you are amazing,
| the best they will be able to do is poach you to their team,
| but they can't override your manager's feelings about raises,
| promos, etc.
|
| (I feel like I'm talking to past me, who I really wish I
| could have told this to earlier.)
| Merrill wrote:
| I've heard that its your manager's manager that is
| important to your career. Your manager can't actually
| promote you, except by recommending you as their
| replacement if promoted or transferred. Your manager's
| manager can either promote you or work a deal with their
| peers to get you promoted.
|
| If your manager is keeping your performance results from
| being reflected upwards, you have a problem.
| stennie wrote:
| A promotion doesn't mean you have to take on the role of
| your manager, it generally means you have expanded (or
| new) responsibilities and expectations. For larger
| companies career progression broadly falls under either
| an individual contributor (IC) track or a leadership
| track. As an IC you can grow your career from Engineer to
| Senior Engineer to Staff Engineer without changing
| managers or teams, and there is a similar progression for
| leadership.
|
| Becoming a manager because you think that is the only
| ladder to climb is definitely the wrong choice. I think a
| great manager is also a leader who takes an active
| interest in the motivation, growth, and outcomes of their
| team. If a management team worked the way you describe
| (manager's managers run the show and broker deals with
| their peers for micromanaged promotions), that would be
| an extremely dysfunctional environment.
|
| In my experience it is always the direct manager who
| recommends someone for promotion rather than the next
| level up (although your manager's manager likely has
| final approval on budget). As a manager, I support and
| coach my team toward their career growth aspirations with
| regular performance & growth conversations. I also try to
| ensure my direct manager has visibility on the state of
| the team, but ultimately they are expected to be looking
| at a bigger picture and trust that I am taking care of my
| team.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| Alternatively your manager could proactively give you bits
| and pieces of that positive feedback without being forced to
| by a formal, time-consuming process.
| electricslpnsld wrote:
| And this is at a company that supposedly prioritizes
| constant feedback, we even have multiple mandatory training
| sessions per year on providing fast feedback. Go figure...
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Is this Amazon? It sounds like Amazon...
| temikus wrote:
| Or just talk to them regarding how you feel. I concur with
| one of the commenters below regarding FAANG - you rarely get
| good feedback if your manager is not supportive of you.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Stop your manager in their tracks next 1:1 and state you have
| some feedback about how you're feeling here. Start by noting
| that it's a very stressful time right now and that these
| concerns are even more important for you. Your manager would
| likely be hurt if you left and good managers appreciate
| upwards feedback so that they can correct on their side.
|
| The fact that the performance rating is good means your
| manager probably is acknowledging the work you do, just not
| to you. The manager input for ratings is hugely important at
| the FAANGs, so your manager is clearly telling others you're
| doing a great job. There's just clearly a gap here between
| you and her/him in that feedback.
|
| Source: Am a manager at one of the FAANGs. I'm finding that
| everyone is overthinking every bit of feedback right now.
| Clearly minor feedback is hard to differentiate compared to
| major feedback. Likely due to the video communications
| barrier and that everyone is a little bit more alone with
| their thoughts. I'm being cautious on delivery because of it.
| There's also less ad-hoc thank you's and acknowledgements
| going around due to the remote barriers.
| m0zg wrote:
| > Stop your manager in their tracks next 1:1
|
| BAD idea with most managers. Your manager is likely to be
| vindictive and insecure if confronted like that. Even with
| peer reviews in place managers have disproportionate
| influence on your reviews, and promo/comp decisions
| (something you readily acknowledge). If the manager treats
| you with disdain, it's almost impossible to fully reverse
| that - it's just human nature, let alone do so through
| confrontation.
|
| The best thing is to move on to greener pastures, of which
| there's vast abundance at any FANG. People can move around
| easily there by design: that way shitty managers get
| naturally de-staffed. Anything else is a sunk cost fallacy.
| Do yourself a favor, and go to a team where you're
| appreciated, respected, and can work alongside decent
| people. Do not tolerate this abuse. Otherwise your career
| will stall, you won't be able to do anything about it, and
| you'll feel miserable throughout.
|
| Source: been there, done that.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| Yes. Suck up to the boss, then say you're interested in a
| new opportunity at Team X, or, sadly, you've accepted an
| offer to work somewhere else, or, you are quitting for
| personal reasons.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I work for a large company. There are four ratings you can be
| assigned - 'not doing your job', 'need more improvement', 'you're
| doing your job average to well', and 'exceptional' for about 8%
| of people.
|
| I can't really tell you how it's measured or anything like that.
| The company has policies about it, but more often than not those
| policies are blatantly violated. It basically comes down to the
| subjective opinions of your manager, the department head, and the
| business people you interact with.
| dimitar wrote:
| I manage 30 people, but I review only 10 of them and the rest are
| reviewed by my team-leads.
|
| We use KPIs and 360 feedback. These are not perfect measures, and
| I acknowledge that often, but are good enough for some purposes.
|
| Performance reviews are easy for all sides if there is nothing
| new in them. If you either side is surprised during a performance
| review they are not talk to each other nearly enough during the
| reviewed period.
|
| If I had the opportunity to evaluate I would experiment with more
| frequent feedback - like monthly sessions, small forms focusing
| on a very few key items.
| edgefield0 wrote:
| What are your thoughts on 360 reviews? I've heard the process
| can be very devisive?
| awinder wrote:
| I've used pseudo-OKRs at the last few places, where there's
| basically a bailout option where you just change the OKRs at the
| end of the year to match what happened (if you were doing well).
| Depends on what you mean by works/doesn't work. In my experience
| performance management is mostly about recording business
| justification for continued employment, bonuses, advancement, or
| the negative versions of these. So by that metric these systems
| definitely work.
| anonymous1111 wrote:
| The OKR's can be ignored as long as there is "progress", but
| progress measurement is still very subjective and statistics
| can be deceptive, so the process often just ends up being the
| usual game of nepotism. Not hitting OKR's can also allow
| managers to request more headcount, meaning they are
| incentivized to make excuses instead of delivering value.
| sameersegal wrote:
| I am in the quest of a system myself. I have tried various
| systems and asked other companies (big and small) on theirs. My
| tech startup was around 25-30 employees over 5 years. We have
| tried Balanced Scorecards/OKRs linked systems, 360 Evaluations,
| etc and ended up making a mix.
|
| We used Google Sheets and asked for qualitative feedback on
| defined headers (skill with KPIs & culture/values), and a rating
| (1-5). Each of the headers had weightage that changed with roles
| & levels.
|
| We tried to make promotions and compensation changes as data
| driven as possible, but they were inline with intuition / general
| opinion. To the employee it always felt like "Why did we do all
| this for such little change?!" It sucks but you need to improve
| the system across many years. With every round try and understand
| signal vs noise. That's how you build trust.
|
| Consistency is key. A few learnings regardless of the system that
| I learnt the hard way:
|
| * Communication. You need to communicate before, during and after
| the process. You need to make it relatable for all levels of
| employees. Give them specific templates with specific examples.
| You need to remove the narrative of you-vs-them, doing-this-to-
| justify-an-increase, and bring focus on reflection.
|
| * Frequency/Cycle. "if it hurts, do it more often" is the quote
| that applies to this. Never let it slide. Minimum every six
| months, ideally every quarter.
|
| * Review of KPIs. You need to review the KPIs every week without
| fail. It forces you to focus on metrics that you can move on a
| week-on-week basis. Anything that changes in step function over a
| month/quarter/year can be broken into a smaller metric.
|
| * Rewards and Recognitions. We were always late on this. Always
| rolling out the red carpet when someone threatened to quit. It
| always felt like extortion as the manager. Don't wait for the
| cycle to call out extreme performance (great and terrible). Give
| negative feedback in private as quickly as possible. Do a non-
| monetary (Amazon Gift Coupons etc) for great performance. Wait
| for promotions and compensation.
|
| * Pay performance linked pay well. I think this was what I got
| wrong the most. I did not plan the company finances well enough
| to pay out immediately. I would say "Hey great performance! We
| will pay you $$ but in 2-3 months when our situation improves".
| That erodes trust in a moment.
|
| * Getting and acting on feedback. I struggled on this one too and
| made many excuses -- we are going through a curve
|
| Hope this helps. I would love to hear from others.
| spaceisballer wrote:
| I'm a big fan of Dr. Deming's suggestions in this realm (for
| those not familiar he was involved with helping the auto industry
| in Japan post WWII among other things). Basically we focus too
| much on the who and not the what. The manager creates the system
| to which the worker is involved in, then you judge the employee
| on your system. So performance reviews are just ways to blame.
| Instead power needs to be placed in the hands of the employee.
| They are closest to the problem and the manager is supposed to
| empower them and basically remove impediments. I'd have to go
| back to the books but I recall him saying a three tier system but
| really aimed at seeing what employees need help and those
| excelling that need to help distribute their expertise to help
| the processes and continual improvement.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| (Disclaimer: I work at Amazon, but don't speak on behalf of the
| company. Just sharing some bits about my experience, this is just
| my experience and doesn't reflect official Policy.)
|
| Prior to working at Amazon, I had mostly worked for start-ups.
| The thing I found at startup is that people are trying to figure
| out processes, and it's kind of hard. Most people putting in a
| process (whether that's HR or the founding team) are trying to do
| their best, but start-ups aren't at a large enough scale where
| they really need to have scalable processes, and for individual
| contributors all the distinctions are pretty informal anyway, so
| there's usually no individual contributor promotion path.
|
| At Amazon, I was fortunate to work under someone who had been my
| boss previously, and we had a good working relationship. He was
| not afraid to give me blunt, useful feedback about either my work
| or how my work was perceived.
|
| At some of the start-ups I worked with, part of the year-end
| evaluation involved filling out a form with a lot of evaluation
| criteria - the employee would fill out a self-eval form, and the
| manager would fill out a form, and then they would compare during
| the evaluation meeting. There's no such equivalent at Amazon.
|
| One thing that overall I like about Amazon's performance
| management in terms of promotions is how it's centered around a
| document that you and your manager write together. There are some
| tedious aspects to the process, but if nothing else when you go
| up for promotion you know what your manager is officially telling
| other people are your strengths and weaknesses. The flip side of
| the process is that decisions about your promotion are being made
| based sometimes on the quality of your promo doc. I'm not sure
| about all the company, but at least in the team I was on some of
| the senior folks set aside time for reviewing promo docs that
| they were working on with other members of the team to iron out
| any "doc writing" issues.
|
| We don't really have an official OKR system, but as a more senior
| engineer my personal goal has generally been to enable whatever
| my team's goal is for the quarter or year (launch this product;
| get this architecture document done; research how to solve this
| problem).
|
| Besides the official process, I've also found it useful to ask
| trusted peers how I'm doing, whether I'm giving them everything
| they need and expect of me. It's also pretty common to have one
| or more mentors outside of your team to give you more informal
| feedback.
| narenchoudhary wrote:
| It was pretty standard (at least on paper) in my last company (a
| top 10 bank in terms of total assets).
|
| 1. Agree OKRs with managers in the beginning of the year (to be
| completed by March). Everyone at same level/hierarchy will have
| same baseline.
|
| 2. Performance evaluation in October. Employees discuss their
| achievements with managers.
|
| 3. Results disclosed in February.
|
| This waterfall-ish process never really worked:
|
| 1. Over the year priorities change, teams evolve, and products
| take new directions. So, everyone used to put vague OKRs.
|
| 2. Evaluation process is a black box. Performance metrics (if
| there really were any) were never disclosed, and were calibrated
| at multiple levels.
|
| 3. You get to know only your evaluation. No data to compare to
| whatsoever.
|
| I've seen this doing damage only. People with good visibility,
| and network used to get better ratings despite average work.
| Silent hard-workers will get average ratings, and will leave.
| fsloth wrote:
| To my knowledge there is no performance management as such (at
| least in my subsidiary). We have a mandatory quarterly review,
| but it's intent seems to be to maintain the manager-employee
| relationship to at least a bare minimum, and to offer a platform
| to collect data if someone is really, really not pulling their
| weight.
| nemetroid wrote:
| You fill in a bunch of forms during the year, at the end they
| tell you you've placed in the highest tier, and as a reward you
| get a 3.5% pay increase instead of 3.0%.
| vosper wrote:
| I've never worked anywhere that OKRs are actually taken seriously
| or followed through.
|
| They'll get rolled out with a big hype, people will fill them out
| with varying degrees of diligence and understanding of how OKRs
| are supposed to work.
|
| 3 months later they're already forgotten and out of date. Some
| managers will try to keep it going for their teams, because
| that's what they were told to do, but that'll peter out once they
| realise no-one else in the org is taking it seriously.
|
| 6 - 12 months later there'll be a half-hearted attempt to reset
| and resurrect the OKR process, but after the first time people
| take it even less seriously the second time around, and after a
| few more months OKRs are never mentioned again.
| [deleted]
| edgefield0 wrote:
| I've had a similar experience with OKRs. The issue becomes how
| often to review and update? On the surface, OKRs seems like it
| would be a helpful tool but in practice it seems pretty
| cumbersome and only moderately useful to guide goal directed
| action.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| OKRs are useful at the level of the company that has medium
| and long term goals, not merely keeping the lights on and
| reacting to short term emergencies.
|
| An OKR is about a paragraph of text per quarter, hardly seems
| cumbersome.
| jdmichal wrote:
| I'm actually defining this process for the first time in my
| current company. I'll explain my philosophy behind performance
| levels and goals. I'd love any feedback. I'm specifically trying
| to make this an actionable process.
|
| First, the levels, because I perhaps have a different
| interpretation of these than I'm used to seeing. There are
| essentially three levels that correspond to performance compared
| to expectations. So underperforming, performing, and
| overperforming. Only underperforming carries a negative
| connotation [0], because it means that you are not meeting the
| expectations for your level. In contrast, overperforming means
| that you are reaching beyond your current level.
|
| So, hopefully we have zero people underperforming. Also,
| hopefully we have the vast majority of people performing. Because
| overperforming basically means we need to be finding an expanded
| role for that person, which we may or may not have. If too many
| people are overperforming, then we can maybe expect turf wars as
| people start trying to expand their role without guidance, which
| is terrible for morale. Hopefully we can balance overperformers
| with growth, so we are moving people to expanded roles and then
| filling in below with new hires.
|
| So, given this leveling, there are two types of goals: baseline
| and growth. Baseline goals apply to the entire team and define
| those baseline expectations for that team. Meeting these goals
| will keep the team out of underperforming territory [1]. Growth
| goals are tailored to a specific individual, and detail specific
| targets to work on. The idea is to provide meaningful growth to
| the person and their capabilities, with an eye towards expanding
| their role. Over time, having and meeting these growth goals will
| result in overperforming as the individual fills that expanded
| role more and more.
|
| [0] Caveat: I would expect a junior-level to be growing. So
| juniors who are not overperforming are worrisome.
|
| [1] There's a bit of issue here in team vs individuals.
| Generally, as long as the team is successful, I tend to err on
| the side of overrating individuals. After all, part of the reason
| we make teams is to allow them to shore up weaknesses and play to
| strengths. However, I leave in an out by having a baseline goal
| centered on teamwork and team success. So if someone is not
| contributing as expected to the team, there's something to call
| them out on.
| sleepysysadmin wrote:
| It has been known for nearly 100 years that you can never
| criticize your staff.
|
| "I will speak ill of no man and speak all the good I know of
| everybody."
|
| -- Benjamin Franklin
|
| Last job, my last performance review. There was literally only 1
| complaint against me. I was late >40 times. My boss told me he
| was disappointed in me. I was upset because I was never ever late
| to work; I was always early.
|
| I asked him to tell me when I was late. He pulled it up.
| Everytime I worked the weekend because I was oncall 24x7; I would
| swipe in and because I swipped in after 8am or whatever it was
| considered a late.
|
| So not only was I going above and beyond helping people
| afterhours, I was taking a hit in my performance review because
| of it. Dont care how stoic you are, that hurts.
| C1sc0cat wrote:
| I hope you then worked out how much TOIL you where owned and
| pointed out to them the definition of salaried employment.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| Salaried employment doesn't mean unscheduled.
| sushshshsh wrote:
| Thankfully, there is none. What a blessing.
| onion2k wrote:
| It's not a blessing. As bad as performance management, goal
| setting, and OKRs can be when it's done badly, working for a
| company that isn't engaged with helping you to improve is far
| worse. Even if you're motivated to improve on your own you'll
| be working with people who aren't and that's more stressful and
| annoying than any number of performance measurement systems.
| cbanek wrote:
| > working for a company that isn't engaged with helping you
| to improve is far worse
|
| I agree completely, however that is usually far different
| than "goal setting" in my experience. It's far more about
| opportunity, which unfortunately is also handed out by
| management.
|
| > Even if you're motivated to improve on your own you'll be
| working with people who aren't and that's more stressful and
| annoying than any number of performance measurement systems.
|
| Welcome to corporate life. I've worked with a lot of people
| who could care less about doing better, and sometimes that's
| right (hey, some of those people even have kids, which I
| would say is a better use of time!). I'd say performance
| reviews add more stress and strife than remove it.
| runbsd wrote:
| Indeed, it breeds apathy. After a while you literally give up
| on making improvements because nobody else cares to do so,
| and you just hit massive walls every time you attempt to make
| change. The best thing you can do is find a different place
| to work, or start your own business.
| sushshshsh wrote:
| Press X to doubt. Everything going fine at my company, no
| politics and profits are good. Maybe some rogue wave will
| come some day but that also happens at companies with lots
| of performance reviews no?
| supernovae wrote:
| Why concern yourself with everyone having to be like you?
| onion2k wrote:
| Because I'm awesome.
| mr_blobby wrote:
| We are a company of about 4000, our performance management is
| pretty shite. We essentially function as a company of middle
| managers with a software engineering department tacked on.
|
| Getting promoted has very little to do with the role profiles of
| the above grade but instead involves doing some menial task, for
| example I knew a guy who was a total manchild and would smash the
| keyboard, groan and hide in the toilet if he encountered some
| difficult code, he would also never ask for help but because he
| did support he got promoted.
|
| Also there's a limited number of slots, so you could meet the
| criteria of the above grade go through the process and still not
| get promoted. We basically lose all our developers after 2-3
| years and most projects are composed of contractors. people who
| can't leave before 2 years and mediocre developers who are
| promoted way beyond their means and aren't good enough to work at
| other companies.
|
| The worst thing is our clients usually have a high opinion of us
| so our competitors must be even worst.
| ochronus wrote:
| Shameless plug about goal setting: https://ochronus.online/goal-
| setting/
| abyssin wrote:
| At my previous company, performance management was a show they
| put on to get a story to tell when it was time to discuss
| compensation. Lack of performance resulted in firing without
| warning. Performance assessment gave information about their
| reading of the job market and the risk you'd jump ship.
| [deleted]
| afarrell wrote:
| Tangent: Are there any good books or articles on how to find the
| answer to this question within your own company as applied to
| yourself?
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| From a task-oriented perspective, developer A can seem more
| productive than developer B because developer A marked more tasks
| as finished than developer B.
|
| The problem is that marking a task as finished does not mean that
| its deliverable is solid. A developer can game the system by
| leaving technical debt behind for others to fix. In this way, the
| developer is stealing productivity from others, by forcing them
| to spend more time reading, debugging, refactoring their half-
| baked code.
|
| A neophyte manager may buy into this approach to performance, and
| even encourage it. But after a few iterations of this
| unsustainable practice of leaving tech-debt behind for no reason,
| reality sets in: now you need an army of engineers to get things
| done because the system becomes fragile and complicated. And you
| also need an endless amount of documentation that is constantly
| getting out of sync.
|
| In a way, under poor performance management rules, development
| becomes like a game of pool: it's not only about having a higher
| score, but also about making it more difficult for others to have
| a high score. If you want high productivity, recognize this and
| penalize it.
| heymijo wrote:
| Performance management is subjectivity masquerading as
| objectivity.
|
| I'm a broken record about this.
| heymijo wrote:
| In theory performance management should be about helping people
| improve. In practice performance management is about four
| things:
|
| 1) Pay
|
| 2) Promotions
|
| 3) Accountability (e.g. firing)
|
| 4) To satisfy legal requirements (perceived and real)
|
| Performance management falls under the umbrella of HR. HR's
| historical roots are in compliance. In the 90's when cost vs.
| profit center was the rage, the HRBP model emerged to prove HR
| could provide business value beyond compliance. HRBP is the
| dominant model now but it hasn't had the impact its creator
| intended. Inertia is a powerful thing.
|
| Combine HR's roots in compliance, with the above four reasons
| performance management exists in practice and that will give
| you a good way to understand why performance management works
| the way it does.
|
| If you're learning about these things in an effort to improve
| your own organization's practices then you can also use the
| above to evaluate any proposed changes and think about what
| they would have to contend with. History is replete with
| failures. Unless you are in a small organization, with total
| control over incentives and the culture then I will leave you
| with a quote from Blade:
|
| _" Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill."_
| ochronus wrote:
| Just to clarify: what kind of goals do you mean? Is the context
| people management or anything in general?
| edgefield0 wrote:
| People management. Goals for staff. Thanks!
| [deleted]
| combatentropy wrote:
| It looks like a total waste of time.
|
| As a developer of internal web apps, it is apparent what I must
| do next to serve my users, in the next week, month, quarter, year
| --- I have a long to-do list! It is also apparent what I must do
| to serve my team, in the next week, month, quarter, year. (I get
| rave reviews from both, unsolicited.)
|
| The goals that cascade from the executives are laughably vague
| and obvious: cut costs, increase revenue, reduce maintenance, get
| to the root of recurring problems, please the customer (of course
| they phrase those things with your typical multisyllabic jargon).
| So what the process ends up being is taking my goals that I have
| already got and writing them down in another place (a shockingly
| flimsy and probably expensive web application they bought from a
| vendor) using certain words that they like. It is a total waste
| of money and time (which, ironically, is counter to at least two
| of their supreme goals).
|
| Let me be clear. While it is theoretically possible that the
| executives know of a problem or need at the company that I don't,
| and when they share their company-wide goals it would be news to
| me, this has never happened. There has never been a time when the
| yearly goals come out and I say, "Oh, well, now that you put it
| that way . . . "
|
| On the other hand, I must be above average, because there exist
| many at my company who, left to themselves, would sit around and
| do nothing, or worse. Presumably this whole ceremony is in
| reaction to their behavior. In my opinion, such people should be
| fired, not babysat.
| azhu wrote:
| My experience matches this to a tee. Engineers who take
| initiative and ownership are the ones most likely to know the
| function of the revenue generator's vital organs and how they
| interact in a system. Execs, product folks, designers, and
| people managers may understand at the level a 5th grader
| understands bodily anatomy, but the engineers necessarily must
| know it on a surgeon's level. For startups.
|
| I will say though, that the executive layer above our heads is
| not to be totally dismissed. They do have vision into things
| that we can lack, namely people and culture stuff that has
| significant impact on the company's long term trajectory. Or
| maybe big acquisitions and whatever. But the people stuff is
| what generates all the perceivably asinine people management
| stuff because if you get rid of the average nonautonomous
| employee, you have no one left pretty much. Hiring good
| engineers is HARDDDDDDDDDDD unless you can just bury the
| problem with cash.
|
| The best potential solve I can personally see still hinges on
| having the right people. For any unit of people at any scale
| doing anything, a leader who can effectively recognize who to
| empower within what boundaries feels like it's by far the most
| crucial thing. I'm not sure there's even a way to have a
| pilotable thing made of individuals without having a conductor.
| If you just build out the org in a way where it can be
| conducted and put good conductors in place then they will be
| able to tell you wtf is going on at the level you need to know
| about and effectively translate your intentions into
| implementation.
|
| Feels like this is the why behind the whole "idk y'all figure
| it out" style of startup engineering nonleadership that's
| becoming common these days. People just flat out don't know
| what they're doing, and even when they know it, they obscure it
| for self-serving reasons. If you have a leader setting this
| example via doing anything but having technical field vision
| and directing as a respected and well liked military officer
| would, then you will have an engineering org that is optimized
| for bleeding money.
| beardedetim wrote:
| > In my opinion, such people should be fired, not babysat.
|
| I feel this same way at most places I've worked. But as I've
| gotten older, I've started to think "how can I level these
| people up?" and that has gotten me much farther towards my
| personal goals than the prior thoughts.
|
| Not staying you should or that you aren't already. Just a
| thought to past me.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| HR people in the UK use 'performance management' as a euphemism
| for a kind of legal constructive dismissal.
|
| 1) Their attitude stinks but nothing specific that can be picked
| up in a disciplinary on its own
|
| 2) They have been in the job for a few years, and their old
| manager never recorded the behaviour problems
|
| 3) Their role is not redundant
|
| So to get them out you meet regularly, set short term goals, and
| be really picky about not meeting them. The whole thing is
| designed to make the staff miserable so they leave or get sacked
| for missing the goals, whilst building up a substantial volume of
| paperwork supporting a legal defence at tribunal.
|
| Or less cynically it allows the staff to understand what is
| expected of them, so they perform better. This never works IMHO
| BewareTheYiga wrote:
| I worked for a big enterprise type company. Our performance
| management process was predictably broken like most BigCorp
| companies processes are. We had cascading goals from the CEO down
| to the team manger level, with numerous layers in between. These
| goals were not data driven in any way. Our performance process
| was heavily biased towards the quarter prior to the annual review
| -- so don't put any points on the board until the 4th quarter,
| that's when they'll count for the most. Common saying -- wins
| cover up sins.
|
| As a manager of a team, I tried to institute OKR's into the
| process for my team at minimum. I found that technique partially
| successful -- meaning successful for me and my team but limited
| in that other teams in my department wouldn't adopt them. Too
| much work they said.
| arethuza wrote:
| I worked in a large company for a number of years that had a
| system where you were scored 1 to 5 (1 being bad and 5
| excellent).
|
| However, it really meant you were scored as either 3 or 4 as
| "nobody is a five and if you were a one or two you wouldn't be
| here anymore". My manager and I did agree it was a silly system
| so we settled on me being a 4 and I set everyone who reported
| to me as all 4s - even though they all deserved 5s.
| madkat wrote:
| Personal level or on a company/business/team level?
| WJW wrote:
| Last company I worked with used OKRs, but in their own "unique"
| way. Senior management was always 3-4 weeks late with the company
| wide OKRs, so the OKRs for individual teams would either be
| wildly divergent from the approved company direction or they were
| switched mid-quarter to align with the company OKRs.
|
| Nobody ever checked the progress of the OKRs either, not even at
| the end of the measuring period and not even to calibrate the
| realism of the goals for the next measuring period. Once, when
| asked at an all hands meeting by the person who had been
| designated "OKR champion" a year earlier, the CEO answered he had
| forgotten about it but that OKRs were certainly still on.
|
| I think the most success was had by a single guy who had managed
| to get "increase twitter followers" on his personal OKR list. Not
| for some company account btw, for his personal twitter account.
| It was continuous hilarity, but I don't regret not working there
| anymore. Whatever system you use, take it seriously.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I've never worked anywhere where the annual review wasn't an
| almost entirely fictional process. It's totally subjective
| finger-in-the-air stuff. Often to my benefit, but I recognise
| that it's subjective.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Slightly off center from your question, but:
|
| 1. Every Wednesday I Google Meet with my salespeople. We review
| the prior week's priority prospects, this week's, and then I ask
| them about clients not on the list that our BI system has
| identified as promising. An integration of internal systems,
| Slack & Zapier alerts me each day to anomalies (good and bad)
| with clients, inventory and systems. MixMax (shout out to Brad!)
| is a big help in tracking email activity. RingCentral reporting
| is a big help in validating Salesperson activity.
|
| 2. Every Friday I review Github repository activity for my
| development teams. A very soft-touch and collaborative
| conversation follows for developers and engineers whose pace of
| work or direction seems off. This is almost always a result of
| improper scoping, unrealistic milestones, or miscommunication.
|
| 3. Every Monday and Tuesday I'm hands-on with my marketing team
| preparing for the Wednesday release of our marketing
| communications, and reviewing ongoing advertising campaign
| results.
|
| 4. Every weekday I'm in our Xero accounting software looking at
| cash flow projections, inventory, A/P and A/R. Xero is hot
| garbage IMHO, but I've built some integrations that make is
| easier to use for real-time reporting.
|
| 5. I visit our satellite facility every other week for in-person
| chats with that team.
|
| 6. I've invested a lot in automation to track our market, predict
| conditions and generate alerts.
|
| Notwithstanding 1-6 above, there's no substitute for good market
| conditions and good employees. I have the latter, but not the
| former. I mention this just in-case you're thinking you can
| systematize your way out of a demand vacuum.
| elwell wrote:
| > I review Github repository activity for my development teams
|
| Would be interested to hear more details about your thoughts on
| this. Do you look at # of commits, lines added/subtracted?
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| 1. Conversation around issues. I look for engagement with
| other devs, suggestions, solutions.
|
| 2. Commits over 2-4 weeks. I expect commit gaps that can last
| up to 2 weeks given some of the problems and constraints
| unique to us.
| jerp wrote:
| Hi this is really interesting. Can you go into any detail on
| how you achieve 6 please? LinkedIn Scrapers and such?
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| We ingest data from various sources, some scraped and some
| from available feeds. Over time, some of that data we observe
| to be predictive. It informs cash flow decisions for next two
| weeks, and it isn't perfect. But, its reliable enough that it
| determines officer salaries and some investment decisions.
| edpichler wrote:
| How big is your company?
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| In the seven figures in sales. Assuming we survive the
| current volatility.
| pryelluw wrote:
| I wonder how much you pay your sales people based on the last
| paragraph.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| We're on par with our market and offer benefits our
| competitors do not.
| forgotthepasswd wrote:
| OT: Hello howmayiannoyyou, can I by any chance interview you
| for 10 min for feedback on a product I'm building? It looks to
| me that it fits part of the workflow you mentioned, and it
| would be useful to hear your perspective. My email is on my
| profile. Thanks!
| sandGorgon wrote:
| What kind of anomalies do you track on clients and inventories
| ?
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Client interaction with proposals.
|
| Client interaction with website.
|
| Client follow-through on 'promises' --> sales methodology we
| employ.
| sandGorgon wrote:
| Very interesting. That is predicated on sales people
| updating some "status" right ?
|
| You could have a very deep sales methodology. Just curious
| if that's how you do it
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Partially on status update and partially on indicators of
| interest (behavior) that we track. Yes, for a company our
| size we're ridiculously sophisticated.
| sails wrote:
| > Xero is hot garbage IMHO, but I've built some integrations
|
| Curious to understand more about these? I've been doing a bit
| of exploring in the analytics space here, and would love to
| know where you found the available apps falling short.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| In short, cash flow is everything. There's no reason a user
| should have to even login to Xero to see their cash
| positions.
| technics256 wrote:
| How does your BI system identify them as promising? Is this via
| company metrics already inserted into your CRM or maybe
| something organically gathered?
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Customer behavior. The customer's conduct determines
| everything. "Wishful thinking" is the enemy of results.
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