It’s that time of year again, the dreaded annual review. The well-meaning manager has yet another stack of endless paperwork to add to their already endless paperwork. When it comes to the annual review, the paperwork for a manager at a restoration company, or anywhere else for that matter, has a special kind of discontinuity as they will face a new-and-improved nebulous employee grading system that someone sitting high atop the organization with a gold tipped quill pen composed as their latest masterpiece. The manager will take the multi-page forms home and labor through the labyrinth that is corporate policy dreading only the distribution of the information more than the lengthy composition.
In business, there are rituals that neither management nor employees enjoy and yet they are widely practiced because a) it’s what everyone else is doing, b) we’re required to do it by the unwritten codes of business handed down from our ancestors and/or c) leadership is unwilling to admit that something needs to change. A recent article in Mashable (as well as other sources) notes that 20 percent of employees feel their managers come unprepared to reviews and the result of more than 30 percent of these annually structured meetings lead to decreased performance related to disengagement from the process (McCord 2015). There may be a battle for whom the dread of annual reviews resonates deeper, the manager relaying the information or the employee receiving the life changing feedback.