Evaluate(Me.Year)

At my office we have an evaluation process which requires that both the manager and the employee fill out the evaluation papers.

Shortly after I arrived here the company started using a webapp that we purchased for doing this. The department manager 'starts' and evaluation, and the webapp sends notice to both the evaluatee and the evaluator, who then proceed to fill out the form using the webapp. When both parties are done with the evaluation form, the department manager meets with the evaluatee to go over the results and present him/her with a pay raise or some degree (should they deserve one).

In general I'm really happy with the process. I'm expected to honestly reflect on my work over the last 12 months and my responses will be held up against the reponses of my manager - this seems to me to be good for keeping the process fair and 'two sided'. It provides a digital record of my personal achievement and progression which can be referenced later on, which is also pretty good. It's a good chance for the evaluatees to meet with the department manager, which is generally pretty infrequent, so this is good too.

There are some problems.

For instance the forms 'categories' or 'questions' seem to not be unique to my position, nor are they whittled to better fit my position. Consequently I (and my manager) end up rating my performance in categories like "Putting the customer first" - which is ridiculous, as I've never once interfaced with an external customer for my product. There are lots of other categories like this one.

Also, the form, because it's so 'general' (by which I mean, it's aimed at evaluating sales and support people, not developers) takes a dog's age to fill out. This year I billed 8 hours against it.

Anyway, as I said before, the process as a whole is pretty good, so I'm not complaining too much.

I got a pretty decent raise percentage wise last year, but I'm hoping for something considerably more substantial this year. For a number of reasons. We'll see how it goes.