The view from the peer

Round and round it goes, what it'll say nobody knows.

There's a new trend in town, and its name is 360° Performance Review. Here's how it works: everyone walks around the chairs, and when the music stops whoever is standing...no, wait a minute, that's something else.

Ok, I got it now. You're volunteered by an email that shows up to sign up for a performance evaluation app. Then, you're asked to select between three and five of your teammates (post on the term "Team player" coming soon) to request feedback about your performance. The feedback comes in the form of pre-determined questions they receive once your supervisor has approved your choices.

So a few things can happen here.

First, I could give $20 each to the people I choose and say write something nice about me. $50 for something really nice. I could do a quid pro quo—if they write a nice review of me, I'll write a nice one for them. Or everyone can just let the evaluations fall where they may.

It's not exactly crowdsourcing my review, but it seems somewhat adjacent. And I'm not sure how I feel about it.

Time was when your supervisor would call you into an office (when there were offices—don't get me started) and tell you what they thought of the job you were doing. Where you needed to improve. What your strengths were. What they expected of you going forward. Now they get to aggregate the information about my performance from several people who

1) I may have pissed off intentionally or not (probably intentionally knowing me)

2) May or may not have any idea about what it is I actually do day to day

3) Did I mention people I might've pissed off?

Ask anyone who knows me, and they'll tell you I'm always first in line as a cheerleader for forward progress. I fully support indoor plumbing, color television, jet airplanes, rural electrification and the interwebs. Be that as it may, the idea of treating performance reviews—which are highly influential in determining raises, promotions and assignments—as some kind of Kickstarter or Indie Go-Go platform doesn't quite make sense to me.

But then I'm in advertising. Very little of it makes sense to me.