Annoying part about corporate...End of the year assessments

For those of you that are in corporate you will know what I mean by the title. I can’t stand writing end of the year assessment. Lucky for me I only have to write my own self assessment, but how do you sum your entire year up on one for. Of course to we have a million formalities that we have to go through with business goals, corporate goals, competencies, how brown I can make my nose, yata, yata, yata.

Is anyone else out there feeling my pain right now?

I spent a lot of the early part of my career a contractor for a major corporation. I never really ever had to do those, but I heard all about them.

The crazy part is that when everyone around you has do to them, and you don’t, you look at them in a totally different way - Not that they are a hated part of the job, but more like, “I am going to sum up what I did for the year, and the manager is going to give me a review so I can learn something important here” kind of thoughts…

PS - There’s often a bonus tied to the reviews, right? A little bit of touting your own horn and a bonus can’t be all that bad!

Yes that is true, but bonuses normally only come if the company hits their numbers. Luckily for me that has always been the case.

Sounds pretty arduous task.

But to look at it from the bright side, you at least have a job to write that assessment about :slight_smile:

True…But it is still annoying. :smiley:

Do you also have to go through the “live” end of year review? Ours is done on the anniversary of our start date and they can be rather brutal… which I guess is more helpful than a bunch of wishy-washy corporate smokeblowing that I’ve gotten at other places.

Yup just finished it up this week. It’s especially fun when your goals at the beginning of the year (like what projects you’re supposed to work on, what you are supposed to contribute to and do) wind up being completely different by the end of the year. Does that mean you failed? Or just that it’s a pointless corporate system.

Oh well. I just have it down to a small science on how to describe my performance in 3 sentences and move on.

“Super kick-ass awesome”

I have a better one. You have a boss at the begining of the year that works with you set-up goals that he thinks you should be working on. He quits the company half way through the year and your new boss looks at your goals and questions them. In this case the questioning was a good thing. You then set new goals and now you have had 6 months to complete them.

All I really want to know is what is my ranking? Are you happy with my performance or not? I shouldn’t have to spend 3-4 day filling out paper work selling myself, but that is the corporate way.

Personally I love filling these out. I do one for myself and of course one each for my team. I keep a word document of running notes all year so I can easily refer back, I also refer to our internal success profiles. I think they are supper important for rectifying discrepancies in expectations and perceived success and failures. Also an opportunity to call out issues, problems, mistakes and celebrate wins, improvements, and milestones.

I agree here as well. Even though I think they are annoying, mostly because I just don’t like paper work, they are a perfect time to call out things that are working and what needs to change. It is also a good time to remind others of your accomplishments.