Is such a thing even possible? Well, I wasn’t able to attend our most recent user group meeting in Chicago, but Randy Reynolds tells me about an interesting comment from some of our customers. We unveiled some new interface enhancements at the meeting that reduce the number of steps managers have to go through to evaluate an employee. It’s called SpeedRater, and it sounds good right?
Well there was apparently some pushback becuase people felt it would enable managers to do their reviews too quickly – thereby removing some of the time for thought from the process. In other words, people were worried that you’d get quick but thoughtless reviews.
But then Randy asked the HR folks to put themselves in the positon of a manager who has a bunch of reviews to do. Would they appreciate the feature then? A room full of hands went up.
So what do you think? Which is more important, speed or thoughtfulness? What’s the happy medium?
As a manager who had 31 360 reviews to do last year, in addition to 8 for direct reports, I can say without a doubt thoughtfulness wins. If you have too many to do, then refuse some, but if you accept the challenge of doing someone’s review, you absolutely must be thoughtful in your comments and your ratings. That being said, I enjoy a clean, easy interface where I can tab from field to field and not have to click my mouse to complete the review I’m working on and on to the next one. But I think that’s a usability question, not a review type question.