Performance Reviews and Calibrations

Performance review process

The performance review process is when employees are evaluated based on their contributions and accomplishments over the review cycle. The review cycle can be annual (yearly), half-yearly, or quarterly. Most companies do it half-yearly or yearly.

The review is mainly built around two aspects of an employee’s performance:

1. What did the individual accomplish throughout the cycle across various evaluation axes?

2. How well did the individual collaborate with others, and what did their peers have to say about them?

Self-review

The first step in the performance review process is self-review. The individual summarizes their performance and accomplishments throughout the cycle along certain axes that the company defines. Broadly speaking, these accomplishments include project impact, collaboration, long-term direction, engineering excellence, team building, etc. Regardless of the specifics, which may vary from company to company, most of these parameters fall under either engineering contributions or people contributions.

The contributions should have a definite metric and, therefore, be measurable. Examples of measurable contributions can look as follows:

• Enabled a feature for X out of a total of Y customers:

  • Though a reasonably good metric, it may not be good in cases where the size of the customer base is proportionately different.

• Spent X hours on hiring and training.

• Improved revenue by X%

As a manager, it is your responsibility to help team ...