Page 93 - Anne Bruce - Building A HIgh Morale Workplace (2002)

Putting the Kibosh on Negativity 73

all employees build their strengths and improve on their weak-
nesses.

Dreaded Performance Reviews
Dr. W. Edwards Deming, founder of the quality movement, says
it best: “In practice, annual ratings are a disease, annihilating

long-term planning, demolishing teamwork, nourishing rivalry
and politics, leaving people bitter, crushed, battered, desolate,
despondent, unfit for work for weeks after receipt of rating, and
unable to comprehend why they are inferior.” Wow, talk about

your negativity invaders!
But wait! Before you go throwing out the forms for your next
scheduled performance review, stop and consider what could be
a better alternative or a spin to improve what you’re using now.
Not all performance reviews are bad. Some can actually be a

valuable source of corrective and positive feedback for employ-
ees. The good ones can help employees measure their progress
and establish with managers criteria for ongoing expectations
and goals.
But here’s where negativity works its way in. Most perform-

ance reviews are not used in a constructive and helpful way. In
fact, they can be quite traumatic, even devastating, if used like
a report card to sum up an employee’s contributions and objec-
tify him or her.
Here’s an example:
No Numbers!
“Well, Marge, when it
Never assign numbers
comes to being multi-task
to people as a way to
oriented, on a scale of one rate their performance. It’s humiliating
to five, I’ve given you a and degrading. It only serves to per-

three, so there’s lots of sonalize that person’s weaknesses,
room for improvement but instead of focusing on the issues.
you’re still doing much Besides, how can a behavior trait be
better than most in the changed through a scoring process? It
can’t. It’s the organization’s system
department. Keep trying.”
that produces its behaviors. Change
Is it any wonder that Marge
the system and the behaviors will
leaves her review feeling change as well.