What does it mean to exceed?
My wife recently received her annual performance review and it didn't go as well as usual. You see, my wife has been with her company for 17 years. She has received an exceeds each and every year until this one. At the end of 2005 she was transferred to a new location and though she was doing the same kind of work (Business Analyst) she was doing this in a new business environment. When she received her review her boss told her she wanted to give her an exceeds but was pressured by other managers. The reason given was that my wife doesn't do the same work as two other analysts who have been working for this Line of Business for years. My wife was told that they didn't expect much from her being new to the business but she did far better then they hoped. If they didn't expect much from her but she exceed those expectations then what does it take to "exceed"?The company does have a policy where only a select percentage of a team can "exceed". That way they can keep costs down (bonuses and pay raises will be lower for those that don't exceed) so this easily explains my wife's situation. She is the outsider and is the easy target of a non-exceeds. But this made me wonder:
"What does exceed mean?"
If you are an expert at what you do and people expect that level, is it possible to exceed? If you are new to a job and they don't have very high expectations is it easy to achieve them compared to the 20 year veteran? Is it difficult to determine when an employee exceeds expectations?
What if you were testing an application to determine it's response time.. If you set you expectations at 2 seconds and the web page responds in 1 then it exceeded your expectations.. If it responds in 2 then it did not. Obviously judging an employee is much more subjective then that or is it? Every job I have had has set my goals for the year ahead of time. Once the goals are defined shouldn't it be easy to see if the employee met those goals?
posted by Gary @ 7:32 PM
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