Appraisals

The most awaited month for an employee is the month of April. It is a special month for every employee because in this month appraisals are conducted. Although in some organizations appraisals are conducted after every project, April is the month in which annual appraisals are conducted.

The most important thing for employee is his appraisal. It is like final exam. We all study to pass exam. If there were no exams I would have never even bothered to know the name of the subjects that I had in the current sem.

Of course, I am exaggerating things.  There are students who study for knowledge. There are employees who work because they want to learn. People like these make people like me look like assholes. Bloody idiots, I got no interest in Gita (Clarification: I am talking about the book and not the girl). Care for the work and not the results or the results will take care of themselves. Something like that. I don’t know the right line. I never had to take an exam on Gita so I never bothered to read Sharp Exam Notes for Gita (Sem IV).

According to my colleagues appraisals determine our value in the organization. They decide how much an employee is worth and whether he has learnt enough office politics plus developed email writing skills to be promoted. This is a wrong approach to appraisals.

The right approach to appraisals is to treat it like Mario, the video game. In Mario you started with a deadline. Reach the flag before the deadline or you are dead. The turtles are the daily targets. You either killed or avoided the turtles to reach the flag. There were two ways to increase your life. Collect coins or deliberately jump on selected turtles. This is equivalent to doing things that you will put in your CV when you start searching for a job after having a bad appraisal.

Management considers appraisal to be a single day process. For the employee it is not. For an employee the appraisal process starts when he receives the appraisal form. You read the several rows asking you to rate yourself on various parameters. After reading the form you think how you will get enough time in office to fill so many parameters in your appraisal form. You talk with the person sitting next to you that HR is stupid and decide that the best place to fill the appraisal form is your home.

You take the appraisal form home and fill it. You ensure that various scores filled by you are same at that of the manager filling your form with few areas where you deliberately give yourself a bit low or high ranking. You give yourself low ranking so that after working for more than one year in the organization you can hear your manger say to you – Hey, you are better than you think. You give yourself higher (just a tad more) ranking so that you can tell your manager that – I am much better than you think. Those who overdo the higher ranking part come out of the appraisal and speak words about the appraiser that will make their mothers call them bad boy.

Once the form is filled, you read the form carefully as if your life is dependent on your appraisal. Once satisfied that you have given the desired ranking to yourself, you are depressed enough to have a beer, call someone special and then sleep. The teetotalers skip the drinking part, call someone special and after making the special one understand that life in a cubicle sucks, go to sleep.

The only part now left of the appraisal form is the creative writing part. Here you need to provide explanations or do you SWOT analysis. You discuss the explanation part with the colleagues who double up as your close friends in the organization and google to know your strengths and weaknesses. I think people googling SWOT can fill awesome googling skills as their strength and lack of imaginative thinking as their weaknesses.

On the big day those who are hoping of a good appraisal come to office wearing formal ironed clothes. Those who are expecting OK appraisal come to office wearing clean tshirt. Those who are expecting bad appraisal come to office as if today is just another working day.

You walk into the conference room and find your appraiser waiting for you. Usually, your appraiser is your manager and you regret praying bad things must happen to this guy while he is driving. You must have prayed that good things must happen with this guy such as he gets a much better job and quits the organization before your appraisal. You take a seat, the appraiser smiles, you smile, you open your appraisal form, the appraiser opens his form and you both play match the following for the next one hour.

Those who have a good appraisal come out of the room smiling and tell the person sitting next to them that they fucked the SOB during the appraisal. The SOB had to change his ratings and accept that various screw up that happened during the last one year were due to normal distribution. Anyone in your place would have produced the same results.

Those who have OK appraisal tell the person sitting next to them that they think their appraisal got fucked. Those who have bad appraisal tell the person sitting next to them that the company’s IT dept is stupid. After all what’s the point in banning Naukri.com from office.

To sum up

There are no winners or losers in appraisals. There are people who can show-off in front of the management and those who can’t.