I had always been ill-prepared and a bit anxious when going to my end of year performance review. Throughout these professional years, I had seen a lot of variations of this exercise, with mixed feelings. That year, I happened to be the most senior in the group and Sonia, our new manager had only been with us a few months. Because we had just included Minh a young professional and Karim a fresh graduate, getting them up to speed had been quite labour intensive. This extra task had not been included in my yearly objectives, but it appeared a necessity if we wanted the team to be operational within a reasonable time-frame.
We entered the room and Sonia started to talk:
“Frederic, she said, you have done this year a very good job, I am extremely happy with you and want to keep you in the team. I recognize the time you spent with Minh and Karim, and thanks to you, they have integrated on a fast pace and are now fully operational. I want them to stay as well, they need to progress in their career, and I have to increase their salary. Because I have a limited budget, I have to make choices. You are already high in the salary ladder and your kids are now grown up and secure. I decided that I will use my budget to help Minh and Karim’s salary progression, but their success is also yours. I am sorry not to be able to recognize you with money, but I know that you have given your best.”
I thanked Sonia for telling me the truth and told her that I was the happiest man on earth for my younger colleague, they deserved that recognition. I took her in my arms and said: “you know, in your shoes, I would have done exactly the same.” I then assured Sonia that she could count on me to do even better the following year.
The next day, I stopped at Godiva on my way to work, and arrived at the office with a big box of chocolates to celebrate…
Surprised?
Well, actually my story above never existed, I all made it up. It is probably the way it should have happened, but, it never did. Because we are so much told that "pay by performance" is THE most efficient way to run companies, because we are so used to the so-called SMART objectives paradigm, and because we are confused between appraisal, feedback and earnings, we sometimes lose sight of what is important to us, to our colleagues, to the company we are working for.
In most companies, under the current rules, nobody can rate well an employee and tell that person that there is not enough money for a salary increase. To justify no raise, managers have to make us unhappy, it is just insane, and often not the truth. In performance appraisal, conflicting interests are fighting each other to result in a poor communication, poor outcome and terrible results. I have almost never seen somebody out of one of these yearly exercises, happy and motivated. On the contrary, every December is plaguing our lives with an experience that demotivates, saddens everyone and lowers companies’ performance. I have always wondered why companies maintain a system that demotivates its collaborators, performance reviews is the most obvious one, painful for managers and employees alike but no matter what, companies are maintaining it. That is the big mystery of corporate life! Top managers must love a certain form of sadism to inflict these individual punishments, at the expense of better corporate performance through collective motivation.
Now, let me recall my real best performance review ever… I apologize in advance if I seize this opportunity to make myself better that what I am in reality. Anyway, this story is close enough to the truth...
We had planned a frac-pack operation on our well OMG-1X. It was the usual practice to ask the service provider to send the key personnel résumés along with the technical proposal. That time the proposed frac supervisor was a 28 years old local chap, Femi, 2 ½ years in the frac-pack business. Everybody in the drilling department started to jump up and down, the service company was requested to provide at once a supervisor with at least 10 years of experience in the job. Silence!
I was flown onto the rig a couple of days before the operation. Femi was there, starting the equipment rig-up. We went into the frac cabin where I presented the operation in details, with the screen-out that I was hoping to get at the end. Femi had a few questions and then I asked him how he felt about this operation.
“Do you think that we can perform this frac-pack safely and successfully?” I asked,
“Yes Sir” replied he, with an unusual to me kind of martial tone.
“Well, do you have one of these client’s evaluation sheets that you are requesting the company’s representative to fill-out after the job?
- Yes Sir! (Again)
- Would you please pass me one?”
Femi rummaged into his pile of documents and handed me one of these sheets over. I grabbed my ball pen and carefully ticked all the boxes, wrote that everything went as per plan and that I would recommend Femi and the service company in the future. I signed and handed the sheet back to him.
“Look, I have said everything went fine, now, we are both committed to make it work! When your rig-up is ready, please let me know, we’ll tour the equipment and pressure test”.
A few hours later, we were ready to pressure test, and then to practice the screen-out drill. We pumped the calibration injection and I handed over to Femi my final pumping design. Before starting the frac-pack, I told Femi that I would call the shots to drop rate, cut sand, and shut-down. Femi would focus on the operational parameters and communication. The tool was placed in squeeze position, the frac-pack started; I checked that the blender was running fine and climbed into the control cabin. We screened-out a bit early and reversed out as per established procedure. It had been flawless, with the thrilling excitement that these operations always carry along.
Sitting in the control cabin, I was doing my paper work and downloading the injection data for later analysis. Femi was there, directing his crew for clean-up and rig-down. At a certain point, he turns around, looks at me and takes a deep breath:
“Sir, I have to tell you something… it’s nice to work you.”
I was baffled. I may have blushed to the tip of my hair. That young Nigerian chap, had just given me my best performance review ever, one that was worth my lifetime of so-called performance appraisals.