In
the world of work ones performance is monitored and measured
constantly. Punctuality, workload, effort, length of breaks,
aspiration, goals. From the second you arrive to the moment you
leave, and probably for some time after you’ve got home, your
effort is graded. It’s a necessary inconvenience for the most part,
without some sort of scale against which your aptitude is measured,
you could turn up and eat biscuits all day, googling flying squirrels
while a pool of boredom induced drool collects on your desk. Those
shadowy management sorts do need to make sure you’re doing
something at least vaguely work related, it is after all what they
pay you that handsome wage for. However, it does seem a tad over the
top to insist on several employee assessments every single year. A
quarterly assessment, a six month assessment, an annual assessment.
Tests, personal statements, ability scores and hours of paperwork
surely statistically pointless. Whatever happened to just knowing
your staff.
I
have had a few office jobs and in most of them the procedure has been
the same. You start by filling in a fairly lengthy document,
seemingly designed to back you in to a corner of exaggeration and
bluster. You are asked to remind those who filled the position in the
first place what the position entails, you are tasked with deciding
how efficient you are in your role, and you are persuaded to reveal
your hopes and dreams for advancement within the company. There is
always a word count on these things, usually it shows the maximum,
but occasionally they require a minimum amount of drivel. So you have
to drivel, but you don’t want to get demoted, or even fired, so you
have to drivel convincingly. Basically you are to embellish in order
to survive. Surely the person in charge can have a minute long
conversation with everyone and find all these things out, negating
the need for typing and describing and inflating and wasting so many
work hours.
After
you’ve filled out your form, management have a little look and then
you have a nice little meeting. You discuss things and explain your
previously written explanations, certain criteria are ticked off,
motions are gone through. You have to use certain buzzwords – a bit
like Catchphrase but without Mr Chips – and over sell everything.
For all the authenticity involved, you may as well inform the boss
that within the year you will have both tripled the monthly profit
and trained a team of ruthlessly efficient Koala bears in the art of
cold calling. Nobody gains anything, neither side can possibly take
anything away from the situation, because one of you has been
sticking rigidly to a set format and the other has been telling the
former exactly what they want to hear. Silly, silly, silly. Of
course, them in charge do need to know things about their staff, but
presumably they already do because, well, they’re in charge aren’t
they? They manage their team, so surely they know all those things
that they apparently need to already.
I
try to be fairly honest about my feelings on this subject even in the
work place, where traditionally you’d probably just keep your mouth
shut, so my employer knows that I don’t hold employee assessments
in high regard. In each office based job where I have been required
to involve myself in this nonsense, it has gone thusly: Form filled
in (to minimum), meeting opened with “Well, as you know I hate
these things”, ten to fifteen minutes of broken conversation in
which the only fact forthcoming is that I don’t really know what to
say, the odd buzzword slips out begrudgingly, offer sentiments of
desire toward advancement, keep job, keep face, maintain status quo.
Not the band. Current affairs dictate that my present employment be
maintained indefinitely, affairs including a small, dependant human
child, a complete lack of funds and a place in my personal timeline
where it seems sensible to earn more money. More money is usually
exchanged for more work or increased responsibility. Or both. So more
recently there has been added honesty in my ramblings about
promotions and moving up the ladder. It’s just that the ladder I
have in mind is quite small and just allows me to reach the Kit-Kats
on the counter until something better pops up.
Jobs
then, are important. But I really don’t think we need to go through
some sort of grey, shirt and tie wearing, fictional character
spinning Employee’s Got Talent, crossed with a low market
‘boardroom’ moment from The Apprentice, just so everything can
stay the same. If you’re trying, you will continue to try. If you
don’t, you won’t. Nothing has changed, except that you’ve had
to either pretend you’re interested or state what you are doing to
the person who watches you do it. My biggest concern though, is that
the entire planet is controlled by people who have excelled almost
entirely because they impressed in assessments. A world where smiling
and bull shitting gets you to the top, where you do what has to be
done because it has always been done, until something happens that
isn’t in the manual and you go ‘oops. I dunno’ and shrug. And
things go badly wrong and they assess your culpability, internally or
legally, individually or through the media. And you pass, because
you’re good at those things. And everything gets slowly worse.
But
that would never happen.
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