Re-views
IT’S ANNUAL REVIEW SEASON in a lot of workplaces, which means there’s a range of anxieties surfacing, both about completing the reviews themselves (which always takes way too long) and about the consequences that come with them: bonuses, warnings, raises, improvement plans—a bundle of precarity and coercive praise wrapped up with capriciousness and barely contained threats. That the ritual so often arrives at the same time as the holiday season and that most horrible of American traditions—open enrollment—is no coincidence: comply! or we will ruin your kids’ Christmas and cancel your blood pressure prescription! is as unsubtle as it is occasionally effective.
Review styles trend with the boom and bust cycle. In boom times, they become more casual, less formal. There’s an emphasis on employee growth, how a manager can help their reports succeed, on delivering feedback up the ladder. In bust times—and we are in a bust now as far as management’s attitude to labor goes, never mind what the stock market says—we see the pendulum swing back the other way. Ratings return in force and are parceled out like rations in a famine, managers made to understand that no matter how effective their team is, very few of them are fives. Quantitative measures drown out the qualitative ones, both managers’ and workers’ observations subsumed to supposedly more reliable metrics like the number of deploys. Disciplinary factors multiply, with managers asked to enforce card swipes into the office, hours spent using AI, training modules completed—all of which has the effect of saying, you’re here to do what you’re told. So do it.
Obviously, I have a preference for the boom-time style (as, I imagine, do you). But the thing I come back to here is that neither way puts people first. Companies adopt and enforce review processes not because they care about humans—whatever our wanton Supreme Court says, companies are not beings that can care—but because they need to maximize the outputs they get from their workers. They can, and will, deploy both carrot and stick in doing so, and the times when they have preferred the carrot have come about because labor conditions made the stick unlikely to succeed. When those conditions have changed—as they have, abruptly, this year—they pick up the stick with no concern for the bruises and broken bones that inevitably follow.
But we care about those bones, and we are in a position to act on that care. And there’s only one way to do that, and it’s to organize. The review itself is a chore you have to complete, an administrative burden, a kind of work requirement that must be performed in order to maintain access to your healthcare (such as it is). But you needn’t squash your working relationships into that trapped and dark little box. Fill out the paperwork, show your documents, click through the training module: this is the price of water and we are all parched. But then go talk to your peers and comrades like you are both actual humans—because you are. Ask them what they need, share your needs with them, and get creative about how you might meet some of those needs together. Tell them what you’re seeing and hearing and ask for their insights; remember that you are compatriots not competitors. Move at the speed of trust and make trust the truth you come back to.
One of the roots of the word “review” refers to reconsideration, to look at something anew. We needn’t be beholden to the received ways these processes show up; we have it within our power to reconsider how we show up in relation to them.
Because the worst effect of reviews isn’t the way they make it easier to target people for the next round of layoffs, or the slashing of confidence, or the rewarding of sycophancy. No, the worst effect is the way they come between colleagues, the wedge they drive between erstwhile collaborators. The directives to assess and evaluate, to compete with each other, are like landmines in a relationship, tools designed to make you defensive, more likely to stab a colleague in the back than lend a hand. Don’t fall for it. Whatever your company’s rating systems, you and your colleagues are all five out of fives at being human. Act like you remember that and your actions will make it true.