Handling Performance Evaluations - Part II

Continuing from yesterday’s post, we’re starting with Tip #4 for handling performance evaluations:

Tip #4: Ask lots of questions! You don’t have to sit in a performance review meeting simply accepting every word that’s said as if you’re sitting in front of the Burning Bush—instead of in front of your supervisor or manager! You have a right to ask for specifics about the statements being made about your performance, you have a right to explain your side of the story in any incident being used against you, and you have a right to ask for the project names and any other information regarding allegations that you are a poor performer or have engaged in negative behaviors, etc.

You can ask questions about anything you want AND your supervisor or manager should have the answer—immediately. They should not have to go talk to anyone to learn specifics. If they have included information on your performance evaluation, they should be able to back it up—on the spot—or there should be conversations about removing the comments from the review. It is not inherently plausible that a supervisor or manager is unable to provide a worker with the specifics about rude, intimidating, unprofessional, or any other negative behavior. Similarly, a supervisor or manager should automatically have the answers regarding missed deadlines, sloppy work/lack of attention to detail or any other performance-related issues.

If your supervisor or manager can’t answer your questions about their critiques of you, you may have a serious problem and you should question who wrote/shaped the content of your review. Ask your supervisor or manager what the issue is regarding their problem with memory recall of your performance or behaviors.

Tip #5: Ask for examples! Don’t allow your supervisor or manager to make blanket statements about you, your work or your attitudes/behaviors. If they want to attack it, they should own it! In other words, if your supervisor or manager wants to make a vague criticism, they should be willing to go as far as they have to in order to prove the criticism is legitimate. On a performance evaluation, every critique and every compliment is used to give your performance evaluation an overall score/grade. That is how many employers decide on an employee’s yearly salary increase, promotion eligibility, etc. Employers look at the overall performance of an employee and they compare it to the overall performance of other similar employees. Every critique adds up—against you!

If you hear something and you don’t know what your supervisor or manager is referring to, ask them, “Can you provide an example of when I allegedly behaved that way?” Get examples because your supervisor or manager will be held to the examples and justifications they’ve provided against you. By asking for examples, it forces your supervisor or manager into a position they may be uncomfortable with, but too bad. Many people don’t like to be questioned, just as a matter of course. Many people believe that their authority, words or commands should be accepted at face value. But, you have a right to ask for examples. Your supervisor or manager took the time to criticize you—in writing—at your yearly review. Therefore, he/she should take the time to defend the content of the review and to make sure you understand where you’ve allegedly gone wrong.

How can you gauge your progress towards correcting negative behaviors or poor performance if you don’t know what the exact problem is because you’ve never been given an example of what you’re doing wrong? How can you improve? You can’t! Without examples, you’re being set up for failure and possibly just set up! Blanket statements can be used to ensure that you are denied a promotion, etc. If you have a racist manager, you can be sure they’ll do whatever they can to make sure they further any goals they have against you—as a minority employee.

Ask for examples. If your supervisor or the company comes up with different “examples” to use against you at a later date, it will make any adjustments to their rationale/story very suspect!

Tip #6: DOCUMENT EVERYTHING!!! If your supervisor or manager says anything strange or makes very harsh critiques of your work performance, behaviors or attitudes—that you believe are completely baseless—write down the exact quotes. I don’t care how hard your supervisor or manager watches you move your pen over your notepad. Write everything down. You may need exact quotes at a later time. Hold your supervisor or manager accountable to everything they’ve said.

In my case, when my supervisor created a mid-year review process, simply to attack me and discriminate against me for another race-based incident at work, she wouldn’t document the content of the fraudulent mid-year review I received. Therefore, I didn’t get a copy of a performance review to sign or keep for my records.

The day before my year-end review, my employers changed the personnel manual to state that supervisors could give “informal” reviews anytime they chose to and they didn’t have to provide a written component for the review. In other words, this justified the lack of documentation for that retaliatory mid-year review. However, I wrote like a fiend. I captured every attack made against me and I submitted a complaint the very next business day. Regardless, the company changed the policy to cover their tracks AND…

My employer only referred to the “2nd half of the review cycle” throughout my year-end review. At no point during my year-end review would either of my supervisors or the HR Representative in attendance talk about the mid-year review. I was told, “That’s old news. We want to move past that.”

Always document what’s being said to you because, even if you do receive written documentation of your performance evaluation, it doesn’t mean that there is consistency with what was written and what you were told. Some supervisors and managers are willing to go out on a limb with what they say, compared to what they write or document. So, document everything!

More tips will be provided tomorrow.

Lax Performance Evaluation Standards and Guidelines

One of the easiest ways to fulfill a race-related agenda against an employee of color is to use the performance evaluation process against that person. What makes this such a good mechanism for targeting employees is that the content of evaluations, as I’ve mentioned before, is often not reviewed for accuracy by anyone outside the departmental structure.

Human Resources staff are not reading each individual review and questioning accusations or negative content. So, supervisors and managers often feel pretty confident that they can get away with formally trumping up false allegations against Black employees.

When White supervisors or managers use this tactic against Black employees, they often try to disguise the true motivation, which is race-related (e.g., to discriminate against or punish the Black employee, etc.). What they often try to do is to take racially-charged accusations and turn them into race-neutral accusations. For instance, instead of using the stereotype of saying that a Black person is angry and defensive or has a chip on his/her shoulder, etc., the White supervisor or manager will say that the Black person can’t take constructive criticism or is “unapproachable.” The reason is that these types of accusations don’t carry any racial weight with them and they sound like the types of critiques that any employee might receive.

These tactics can make it hard to prove discrimination because they don’t sound racially-loaded and could potentially be true. So, you have to reveal the motives, as I keep reminding you, behind all of the accusations being made about you.

Not only that, you should look at challenging your company’s performance evaluation process, if you believe that your employer uses lax and corruptible standards for evaluating employee performance. Here are some things to consider and argue, regarding performance evaluations at your company:

-- Does everyone get a mid-year review and/or year-end review? If every employee at your company doesn’t receive a mid-year review or a year-end review, the entire performance evaluation process is unfair and inequitable from the start. Every employee should be held to company-wide standards, as well as job specific standards. Therefore, if one employee is being held to the letter of the performance review guidelines and company-mandated standards for performance, EVERY employee must be held to those same standards or disparate treatment/discrimination is applicable. Additionally, if some staff are getting mid-year reviews, they are at an advantage because they know where they stand regarding their performance and they know what they need to improve before the end of the performance review period. EVERY employee should be treated and evaluated in the same way. Find out if some employees are getting mid-year encouragement and advice on their work performance, while others are not.

-- What standards guide the reviewers that administer performance evaluations? For instance, what training are reviewers given before they are allowed to evaluate employees? And, what reviewer errors are they warned against, if any? For instance, are they warned against recency error? Recency error means a reviewer gives a biased performance review based on something RECENT that took place, instead of based on the employee’s entire performance for the review period. This is very damaging, when the recent thing/allegation is negative.

Or, maybe there was subjective judgment error, which means that too much weight may have been placed on an incident (positive or negative). Subjective judgment error can slant a performance evaluation too far in either direction. Reviewers use subjective judgment errors intentionally, when they want to prop up their favorite staff. So, they’ll blow the most routine duties into life-saving, money-saving feats of glory in order to justify a big salary increase or promotion for one of their peons. Subjective judgment error can be used to deny a promotion or significant increase to a targeted/disliked employee. So, a reviewer may use minor incidents or fabricated incidents to ensure that a person is stifled, frustrated, punished, etc. for reasons that may not truly exist, except to serve the agenda of the reviewer.

These are just 2 types of reviewer errors that reviewers should be cautioned against prior to evaluating employees. So, find out if there were any training or reviewer cautions provided by your employer.

-- If there aren’t any official standards/criteria for conducting performance reviews and evaluating employees—there should be basic standards, even for “informal” reviews—how can performance reviews be administered in a fair and equitable manner? Every supervisor, manager, etc. must be using the same criteria for company-wide standards and job specific requirements. This is the only way to ensure equitable treatment and comparable evaluation of employees. And, this prevents some supervisors and managers from propping up desired staff based on lax standards that others don’t benefit from.

-- Can your employer produce a written copy of company-wide standards and job specific/job level/job classification expectations of performance?

-- Can your employer identify when these standards were shared with employees, so they’d know how they would be evaluated?

-- Can your employer identify when official standards were shared with reviewers?

-- Who at the company ensures that the standards are upheld by reviewers? What are the checks and balances for the performance review process?

The reason this is a valid question, is that at my former employer, big problems developed because White managers were targeting Black staff with negative performance evaluations that contained surprise content and false allegations that only served to ensure that these Black employees would not be promoted and would not receive a significant salary increase.

After 2 external investigations were launched, suddenly this employer changed its review process because they alleged that supervisors were ACTING ON THEIR OWN in preparing malicious reviews or inaccurate performance reviews for employees. And, they stated that they suddenly realized that far too many supervisors were not the most knowledgeable about what their subordinates were actually doing. So, instead of having supervisors go to staff or other project managers to find out how their subordinates performed the new policy was that the project manager, etc. that worked with an employee most frequently would be the person identified as the employee’s primary reviewer. A secondary reviewer would also be put in place, to add another layer of REAL input.

While we worked at the company, nothing was done, we were told the process was fair, and we were both told that none of the reviewers assigned to us would be removed. The company forced us to get reviews from supervisors that were engaged in illegal misconduct and that demonstrated clear race-related issues with us.

So, again, a question you might ask is: what are the checks and balances involved in the review process?