We’re in that time of year foisted by corporations upon their employees: The Annual Review. Most of the time at the company where I work, the review period is followed by salary adjustments or merit increases. Not this year. For the second year in a row, there will be no merit increases and that policy won’t be reviewed until sometime no earlier than the third quarter. However, whether form should follow function or not, we are in the annual review season. Everyone must be classified into one of three categories: an outstanding performer (no more than 15% of the population can be in this category), successful performers, and those requiring development (5% of the population must fall into this category). The unfortunate in the latter class either have to clean up their act or get managed out of the company.

The timetable requires employees to write a self assessment by the end of December. The manager then has to write a review by the end of January. Then there’s a few weeks of jockeying around to meet the quotas. The Human Resource Department has to give their OK on the ratings and bless the reviews being given to those requiring development. Finally around the end of February, we have the Annual Employee Review which is a one-on-one meeting with the employee’s manager.

I’ve yet to figure out how this process really works to anyone’s benefit other than keeping the Human Resource people gainfully employed. In the employee’s eyes it becomes even almost a joke. Further, in an era of "Shut Up, Sit Down, and Be Happy You Still Have a Paycheck," it’s no wonder that cynicism reigns.

Of course, some of this rant comes because of my own review. It is less than sterling … despite a very, very good year. To read the review you would get the opinion that I’m barely one step away from being managed out of the company. I shouldn’t let it bother me very much — the man I work for is just that way. I don’t think he is capable of writing a review in any other tone. It’s impossible to do any job and have it done correctly from his viewpoint. He would have done it differently. And, of course, doing the job isn’t sufficient, it has to be done precisely in the way he would have done it.

So, what kind of job did I do last year? In January, faced with a very bad financial picture, the company determined to reduce headcount by 20%. In the Information Technology Department, we went one better reducing staffing by just over 30%. The cuts were deep and painful. It left me one person deep at every skill position. If anyone were to quit, go on disability, or even go on a vacation, we would be very short staffed. Beyond that, I was to decrease my spending by another 15%. With that backdrop, we aggressively re-negotiated contracts taking advantage of our supplier’s equally difficult positions. We reduced maintenance coverage. We stopped travelling and put all training on hold. We achieved a 19% percent reduction when the target was 15%.

A major concern was staff burnout coupled with judgment errors since there wasn’t any ability any more to do peer reviews on proposed work (the peers were all gone!), much of the staff were on call every night and weekend, and the workload didn’t decrease even though the staffing had been reduced by a third. I personally felt that the company had to plan for one major system outage each quarter that would last eight hours or longer and so informed management.

To counter that, I implemented plans to recognize the good things that my staff did. We still had a small amount of discretionary money for small awards, such as a dinner for two, or a check for $500 or $1000 (before taxes, of course). Good work and good thinking would be seen by their management and appropriately recognized. We took a hard look at the on-call policies and shifted the workload around as much as possible to have as few people as possible chained to the office. A Microsoft systems adminstrator could be the first line of defense for both Microsoft and Unix systems and vice versa. We encouraged people to take their vacations and release workplace stress. The results were excellent. We had one system outage in SAP that lasted for a half hour and that was due to a hardware failure. The Oracle ERP system had two short outages in the year, both due to hardware. Uptime and reliability improved significantly over the previous year. No one quit, no one went "postal," and no one switched over to apathy mode. We have some personnel issues, but nothing beyond what would be expected in any normal IT shop.

We also accomplished several other very important projects despite severely constrained spending. We implemented wireless access inside all our major locations (which has been very well received) and had an outside firm audit it to verify its security. We built a disaster recovery site for both SAP and Oracle ERP using available hardware and did two successful failover tests. We put in place the ability for employees to access their e-mail and calendars through any internet-connected web browser. We brought up almost twenty new servers in the data center supporting collaboration, intranet search (the "Google" of the company, content management, product line management, and an employee portal. We acquired two more small companies and integrated them into our infrastructure. And we revamped our entire data network as part of renegotiating contracts to take advantage of the latest in wide area network capability.

All of that was well and good — I guess it was what was expected. However, according to my review, my fuse is sometimes too short. I don’t check the information given to me by my staff thoroughly enough before giving it to my boss. There are a couple of other things equally as dastardly.

So, I’ve been reviewed and found, well, somewhat wanting. At least I know that I haven’t reached perfection, yet. I have yet another year to work on it. I also got something to rant about…! But pardon me for a few minutes while I go be a bit cynical about The Reviewing Season.

Today I turned in all the reviews for all the folks who work for me as well as the folks that work for them. The employee one-on-one meetings have all been held. The season is over for another year. Something else to be thankful for, me thinks.