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.

Time after time

Every ad agency has their own way of recording hours employees put toward each job. And you couldn't blame anyone for thinking that, being the creative places they are, they might have a more inspiring way of going about it.

But sadly, like insurance offices, mortgage companies, law firms and other traditional businesses, agencies use timesheets to track hours, and reconcile them against the budget and scope of the assignments.

It's the only way they can find out if they’re allocating their resources properly (laughs hysterically – they never allocate properly), and if not, fine tune them to at the very least break even.

In days of old, back around 2003, agencies still required paper timesheets. Creatives would guestimate the number of hours they put against each job (why do you think they call it creative?), and then hand them in to a smiling, welcoming HR person waiting to make sure every thing goes perfectly with regards to you getting paid for your efforts (Cough, cough, couldntcareless, cough, cough).

Digital time sheets soon followed, but even so most agencies today still require you to print a hard copy then hand it in. Which begs the question why bother with an online version at all.

Of course, agencies beg the question "Why?" all the time.

Why pitch an account they’re completely unqualified to service.

Why embarrass themselves fighting to keep an account that’s been out the door since it arrived, and is making a beeline for it no matter what they do.

Why keep hiring alcoholic posers in leadership positions who've been “quitted” from their last five jobs (perhaps I've said too much).

Online timesheets also require you to account for every minute of every day. And if you don't happen to be slammed wall to wall every day, there's always a job number for a category called "General Overhead." It's the column where you list time spent for things like Facebook, Words With Friends, watching Apple movie trailers, (ahem) writing blog posts, going to lunch and reading What Would Tyler Durden Do.

On the spreadsheet the client sees it's called Research.

The point is - and yes I have one - that it doesn't matter how well agencies manage to finesse their digital timesheet algorithms. It seems that, for the foreseeable future, even though they're going to tout the convenience and efficiency of filling out timesheets online, they're still going to want you to print out a hard copy for accounting to hang on to.

You know, for the lawsuit.