Breath of fresh air:
Anonymous job performance reviews be ‘refreshingly’ positive — or positively brutal
Brett Fields says he’s been through numerous performance reviews as an employee but he really remembers only one. In fact, he says, he recalls that particular review nearly word for word. “I was at a financial firm that had a blind review one year, which meant you were critiqued by other people in your department but you had no idea who wrote what,” Fields says. “It was all anonymous.”
So what made the blind review so memorable? Someone questioning Fields’ dedication to the firm? A reviewer saying Fields was too smart to be where he was and should have the job of his boss? Or was it the review that pointed out his teamwork skills were lacking because he ‘never bothered to look people in the eye.’”
None of the above, says Fields, although they all were included. Instead, it was simply this: “I love working with Brett because his breath smells great. It’s minty and refreshing.”
Silly? Unhelpful? Definitely not, says Fields. “When you’re working with numbers, you’re always looking at a spreadsheet or a screen over someone’s shoulder,” he says. “You’re face-to-face with people all the time, literally two or three inches away.”
And fresh breath, he says, is key. “Call me vain but I’m always chewing gum or mints because I know what it’s like to work with people with bad breath,” Fields says. “They may be brilliant but if you can’t get close, you won’t pay attention to anything else. Your mind gets all foggy and you spend so much time trying to figure out how not to breathe out of your nose, you lose focus.”
Being blunt
Fields says he read the fresh-breath mention as not only a compliment but also as a reminder to stock plenty of Altoids. Later that year, when he participated in a certain blind review, he wrote a similar note. “But mine was telling someone they made it difficult to work together because of their breath,” Fields says. “I was being honest. It was more important to me than how fast they worked or how accurate they were. I could fix numbers. I couldn’t fix bad breath.”
And did it work? “Like a charm, like this person must have gone on an all-out assault on his bad breath,” he says. “It made a huge difference.”
While bad breath may seem like a minor issue at work, the method in which it was addressed is not. “I don’t recommend blind or anonymous reviews for any HR department,” says Harlon Reynolds, an executive adviser in San Francisco and a former job analyst for the U.S. Department of Labor. “It’s a great way to get people to be honest but it can be very divisive. It can tick a lot of people off.”
Better left unsaid
Maryanne Kaish, an administrative assistant in Boston, says she has horrible memories of a departmental review of her boss, a review in which no one attached their names. “And we were always a very close group. People were honest and engaging and that review ruined it for our department,” Kaish says. “[The boss] was actually the person who set the format for the review — he asked for it — and when he read it, he went ballistic.”
Kaish says the reviews were “incredibly specific, which was a mistake because he could tell who wrote what.”
People critiqued the management style of their boss, his penchant for leaving the office right after lunch every Friday, even when there was still work to finish, his distracted behavior in meetings and finally, his inability to do simple math. “That one killed him. The guy’s a genius when it comes to strategy but if you told him we had a budget of $600,000 for a 10-week outdoor marketing campaign, he’d say something like ‘how are we going to have any impact for $6,000 bucks a week?’” Kaish says.
As a result of the departmental review, Kaish said her boss began keeping his office door closed, rarely made small talk with others and ultimately, left the company for a new employer. “It had to be humiliating for him,” she says. “I think people got a little carried away with some of the stuff they said. You wouldn’t say someone is really dumb when it comes to basic math if you had to attach your name to it. Maybe you’d reframe it as something like ‘moves past the small details at times, for example, when putting together numbers for a budget, to get to the big picture,’ or something like that, but there’s some stuff you just shouldn’t say. It all seemed a little harsh.”
Fields isn’t so sure about that. Aside from the breath compliment, his blind review also mentioned his condescending attitude toward younger co-workers, which he often exhibited by waving them off once he was finished discussing whatever issue needed attention. “That was an eye-opener for me. That hand thing is a real jerk move but it’s something I do with my friends, like ‘away with you. I’m done here.’ It’s a joke but people from work didn’t know that. They just thought I was being rude,” he says. “After I read that, I felt awful and I try very hard to not do it in the office.”