assessing yourself (mental masturbation, the office edition)

this isn't about me, i swear. some dude that works at some other place that i don't work at told me all this and now i'm rewriting it to share with everyone because i feel it's worth other people reading (so if you're a boss or coworker of mine, it's your own fault if you assume this whole thing is really about me and that the statement i just made before this sentence is a lie... your fault).

however, to keep it all as simple as possible and to not further complicate things, i will now write the rest of this in a first person narration... only to keep it simple cuz i'm a simple dude.

once a year we receive our annual review at work. we then receive some sort of compensation (or none at all) based on this review. the review is given by our superior and for the most part, from what i can tell, it's based mostly on what my immediate supervisor observes of my performance for the year.

however, they make us complete a self assessment. we're given 4-5 topics and then we're asked to give ourselves a score of 1-5 for each topic, we're asked to pontificate a bit as to why we think we deserve the score we gave ourselves.

it's all masturbation to me... not actual masturbation... but we are playing with ourselves. and our bosses, they're watching us cuz they're sick bastards. not only are they watching us, but i think a good number of them are enjoying it.

beyond that, many times our superiors are watching us and waiting for us to finish. and once we're done and ready to call it quits and put the whole awkward experience behind us, they'll tell us the way we did it wasn't good enough. they'll give us pointers on how to improve and then expect us to go and do it all over again.

i wouldn't feel so bad about it if i felt the whole process amounted to anything. i can't help but feel like the whole thing's a sham. there's no way they're gonna process our raises based on how we grade ourselves. if that was the case, all the employees in the office would've been onto it a long time ago and everyone would give themselves high grades and call it a day.

if i give myself all 5's (the best i could give myself), there's no way my boss is gonna look at it, read the explanations behind the 5's, and then tell me that he agrees. what happens at the very end of the self assessment process is my boss tells me what he graded me on everything. there's no grand negotiation. if he gives me straight 2's (just as an example, i'm better than 2's people), it's not like i can take my straight 5's and hope that he'll average everything out and i'll have straight 3.5's. my raise is gonna be based on those 2's and that's the final score.

and i'm not trying to shit on my boss here. i'm pretty sure he's gotta turn around and do the same thing with his boss... and so does his boss and so on and so forth it goes all the way up the ladder. it's just the way it is and there's nothing my boss can do about it either.

my guess is this... and i don't know this for sure, though based on my many years of service, this explanation makes sense to me.

someone up high... or maybe a group of people collectively up high, come up with some number that's acceptable for raises this year. like if everyone got a 2% raise across the board, the company would be fine with that.

so then they tell their underlings that they can give out raises however they like, but in the end it all MUST average out to 2% per person. some people might get nothing and some people might get a 4% raise... but as long as the average is 2%... all is well in number land on the top rung of my company.

so my boss has a department and he's probably told to keep the average to 2% within the department. most likely, especially since it's a small department, he's gonna give everyone in it somewhere close to that 2%. why mess up the average or try and complicate things? but he's still gotta toe the company line and tell us to do self assessments cuz that's the process and that's that.

the best case scenario for the company is that employees give themselves lower scores than what their bosses give them. let's say i give myself all 2's, and my boss wanted to give me all 5's... he's probably going to see the 2's i gave myself and lower his a bit... maybe he'll lower them to 2's... maybe to 3's... who knows? but it's less money the company has to spend so it's the really good thing to do (company line wise) in the end.

that's why it's imperative to score myself high. i don't need to believe i earned those high scores. but i can't let them shaft me if for some reason they were gonna rate me higher than i was going to honestly rate myself. there's no punishment in this whole process for being too full of yourself.

anyways... the whole thing seems like a joke. the idea of a self assessment in principle is a cop out for managers who should be paying attention to their employees throughout the year. that's what effective management's all about, right? but i'll play the game... and i'll fill out the forms and i'll take orders to rewrite it once or twice and then i'll sit down and get my average raise and find out everyone else got an average raise as well (even though they tell us not to talk about it with each other... but c'mon!!). and then the whole thing will be done. i'll have a little more money... just in time to find out my rent went up again.

hooray life! i give it a 5!