Gruntled Employees

How Twitter will kill annual performance reviews

My daughters go to elementary school in Newton, Massachusetts. The principal — who is, sad to say, retiring this year — is a brilliant, caring, dynamic educator named Christine Moynihan. One of our favorite things about her — and there are many — is that from time to time, she makes schoolwide announcements over the loudspeakers in which she awards chidren “Wows.”

What is a "Wow"?

A “Wow” is a short description (maybe three or four sentences) of something a pupil did to earn the Wow (yes, it's self-referential; get over it). Examples include working extra hard on a particular project, helping a classmate during a difficult situation, or showing unusual courtesy or friendliness or determination. Dr. Moynihan says the Wow winner’s name and describes what he or she did to earn the Wow. That's it. It’s short, it’s public, it’s concrete, it’s earned — and it makes the kids feel great.

Compare this to the workplace. In the workplace, we don't have Wows. We have annual performance reviews.

I hate annual performance reviews. As an employer, I hate writing them. They take a lot of work, and they often feel artificial. As an employee (back in the day), I used to hate getting them. They never seemed like they appreciated the employee that I was, and instead focused on fitting me into little boxes. And as an employment lawyer (defending employers), I hate reading them. Too often, I read the annual performance evaluations of employees who were fired for poor performance, only to find no written record of the employee’s suckiness. And you can imagine how that looks to a judge or hearing officer — an unbroken string of “Satisfactory” marks. Swell.

Why do performance reviews bite? For a number of reasons: They’re hard to write. We want to be fair and accurate, but we don’t want to sound like a machine. And for some reason, criticisms seem worse in writing than when spoken, mainly because the written word has no facial expressions or nonverbal cues to soften the blows. Plus we know that written criticisms can fester and grow inside a personnel file, and we know that employees generally have a right to read their personnel files. So we tend to pull our punches, and leave out details of poor performance — details we may regret not having in some future litigation defense.

All in all, I think many managers miss the point of performance reviews. If the goal is to get the employee to continue to perform well or to start to perform better, then why are waiting a year to do that? Why are we using a hyperformalized, bureaucratic form to convey these feelings? And if the point of the review is to correct behavior, doesn't this seem like a funny way to do it?

We need a better way.

I propose that we replace formal annual performance evaluations with a workplace equivalent of the Wow.

Enter Twitter.

One of the great beauties of Twitter — and I believe one of the reasons it has been so transformatively successful — is its 140-character limitation on messages ("tweets"). In fact, I don’t see it as a limitation (in a negative sense) at all. In many ways, knowing that you have only 140 characters to get your meaning across is very liberating. It forces you to eliminate everything unnecessary. It forces you to choose your words very carefully. It forces you to edit. It may take a little more time to write something that short than it would take to write something a little longer, but that’s OK.

So tweets are limited in length, just like the three- or four-sentence Wows at my daughters’ school, only shorter. Come to think of it, this isn’t really a novel idea. It was in fact the central premise of Ken Blanchard’s 1981 classic management guide, The One Minute Manager.

Tweets are also public. Like the Wows being broadcast over the school PA system, a Twitter message is broadcast over the internet to anyone who happens to be following you, plus anyone who happens to be searching for something you’ve written about. Once you’ve pressed the “update” button, your tweet is out there for the world to see.

And finally, it’s unique and free form. There are no boxes or multiple-choice answers or “satisfactory/unsatisfactory/NA” responses to contend with. It’s difficult to cut and paste from previous forms. The writer actually has to put thought into the tweet.

So I propose replacing the annual performance review with a twitterable evaluation — a “twevaluation,” since the Twitterverse loves neologisms. Some guidelines:

• First and foremost, if you haven't already, sign up on Twitter.
• Identify the employee and give the Wow. If the employee’s already on Twitter, use their Twitter name with the @ symbol.
• Use the hashtag #twevaluation at the end of the tweet. That makes it easier for people to find them. Don’t know what a hashtag is? Look here.
• Keep it to 140 characters, including the name and the hashtag. But remember, Twitter isn't text messaging. Most Twitterers use actual English words, not SMS abbreviations like "c u l8er." Very simple space savers (like "&") are OK.
• Don’t use a twevaluation to say something bad about an employee. Trust me as someone who defends companies in employee lawsuits: you don’t gain anything by publicly dissing an employee. Save it for a direct message. Better yet (much better yet), be a person and do it in person.
• And remember: follow your company’s Twitter policy. Don’t have one? Here’s our Twitterable (exactly 140 characters long) policy.
• I'll start. Follow me at @jayshep and read my #twevaluations as they come in. Or search Twitter for #twevaluations.
• Then contribute your own. You don't have to give every employee one. Start with a couple, and add them when your employees earn them. It's not about keeping score; it's about recognizing good performance and encouraging more of it.

I hate people, but I love this blog

I don't really hate people. I'd really be in the wrong business as an employment lawyer if I did.

But "I hate people" is the name of a terrific blog I recently learned about. Its full name is I hate people ... but it's nothing personal: Office jujitsu for outsmarting the corporate oafs. (Why isn't it oaves? We don't buy loafs of bread, do we?) Jonathan Littman and Marc Hershorn cleverly cover the workplace, standing up for common sense and trying to prevent office people from turning into what they call sheeple.

Read their recent take on corporate reviewing of employees' social-media traffic in "Face(book) Off." And in "Brand Hate: Domino's Pizza YouTube video scandal," Jonathan digs deeper to get at the root of an embarrassing corporate exposure. Their analysis of workplace issues is rooted in a philosophy that's similar to ours: disgruntled employees cause problems, so try to keep them gruntled.

Jonathan and Marc have a book coming out in a couple weeks. I'm looking forward to reading it. In the meantime, head on over to I hate people and start sharing the hate.

A twitterable Twitter policy

You know that something new has gone mainstream when the employment lawyers get involved. So it is now with Twitter, the microblogging service that is currently taking over the universe.

Twitter has grown rapidly and enormously. There are approximately six million users right now. This is much smaller than Facebook or MySpace, the older members of the social-media set. But the pace of growth has been incredible; one source pegged it at 1,000 percent in 2008 alone. By most accounts, the demographics of Twitter users skew older and more professional than Facebook. For example, 52% of Twitter users are 35 or older, compared to just 19% of Facebook users. That makes sense, since Facebook began as a college-oriented site. Also, it is said that "Facebook is about people you used to know; Twitter is about people you'd like to know better." (The widely repeated quote is from a Globe and Mail article by Ivan Tossel, but you have to pay to read it.)

Some of you may still be asking, “What is this Twitter thing, anyway?” (“And don’t say microblogging again, because that doesn’t help.”) Twitter is a free service that allows users to send very short messages (called tweets) over the web to people who (in theory) care. How short is very short? No more than 140 characters, including spaces and punctuation. In fact, they even have a name for a tweet that is exactly 140 characters long: it’s called a “twoosh.”

According to the site itself, the messages are supposed to answer the question, “What are you doing?” To be sure, most people don’t care to learn about the humdrum of your daily life: “I’m still in line for my venti nonfat extra-hot latte.” Or “Mr. Biddles rolled over again. Silly cat. LOL.” That sort of tweet is of value to exactly no one. (Even Mr. Biddles would cough up that hairball.)

Where it does become valuable to businesspeople is where people answer the question, “What are you thinking about?” Or: “What is interesting to you?” Then you try to find other people who might share your interests, and you “follow” them to learn what they’re thinking about. Often, they will reciprocate by following you. Done right, people can use Twitter as a powerful networking service to get in front of potential clients or colleagues within their industry.

As often happens when employees start doing something new, companies soon want their lawyers or HR people to create policies to restrict it. This happened in the Nineties, when employers got nervous about email and internet usage. More recently, companies have instituted blogging policies, and guidelines for the use of MySpace or Facebook. So it’s no surprise that we’re starting to see requests for Twitter policies.

Longtime readers of Gruntled Employees know how I feel about the hyperlegislation of the workplace by zealous policymakers. Well-meaning HR professionals and employment lawyers tend to throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to policing employee behavior, whether online or not. I generally advocate a simpler approach that involves treating employees as grown-ups who have judgment. See, for example, “A two-word corporate blogging policy” and “The world’s shortest employee handbook.”

With that said, here is my take at a corporate Twitter policy that has the extra added benefit of being itself twitterable:

Our Twitter policy: Be professional, kind, discreet, authentic. Represent us well. Remember that you can’t control it once you hit “update.”

And yes — that's a twoosh: exactly 140 characters of pure employment-law goodness.

By the way, you can follow me on Twitter at @jayshep — as long as you follow the policy, too.

[By the way, without realizing it, I totally boosted the cat-rolling-over bit from Guy Kawasaki's excellent post, "Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter."]

Watch your wiki

Managers and HR professionals have to pay attention to their employees. It's right there in the job description. Monitoring work, evaluating performance, tracking compliance. Sometimes, for various reasons, they have to pay attention to other things: an employee's computer files, email or internet usage, or MySpace page.

Well, now there's something else to monitor.

As you probably know, Wikipedia is "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." It is the world's largest wiki, which is a website that people can collaboratively draft and revise. (I often try to throw handy, helpful Wikipedia links into posts.) It's a great resource for quickly learning about basically anything. As Steve Carell's character Michael Scott said on "The Office":

Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.

Mind you, this came in the same episode where Michael said this:

It was a crime of passion, Jan. Not a disgruntled employee. Everyone here is extremely gruntled.

(Remind me to get my lawyers after NBC.) (Or as NBC calls them, "law stylists.")

Anyway, since anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry, nearly anyone does. Many Wikipedia contributors and editors log in to a free Wikipedia account, and make their contributions and edits "in the clear." But many others make their points anonymously, which can lead to abuse. Imagine a disgruntled employee firing up Wikipedia (anonymously, or perhaps pseudonymously), then amending her company's Wikipedia entry to include the intraoffice illicit affairs going on in the Sales Department. Or the secret cross-dressing in Accounting. Or whatever.

People can also embellish their company's Wikipedia entry. Dave Hoffman over at Concurring Opinions had a piece last summer about Wikipedia users at major law firms changing entries to "burnish their reputations and trash their competitors." See "A Slow Day at the Office: Lawyers Editing on Wikipedia." Robert Ambrogi had a similar collection at his LawSites blog.

But there's hope for HR pros and managers looking to see what their wiki-wielding workers (OK, I promise I won't do that again) are doing to their corporate entries. Last year, Cal Tech grad student and hacker extraordinaire Virgil Griffith created WikiScanner, a tool that links Wikipedia edits to the companies and organizations owning the computers that made the edits. In other words, say you're sitting at your desk at Dow Chemical, and you want to anonymously remove references on the Dow Wikipedia entry to Bhopal or breast implants. You make your changes and lurk off into the night. But WikiScanner will rat you out, by cross-referencing the IP address of your Dow computer to the IP addresses known to be assigned to Dow. While WikiScanner can't identify your particular machine, it's likely that the company's IT geek squad can narrow it down to your station.

Wired magazine wrote an article last year announcing WikiScanner and including a list of the most salacious edits, including the Dow example I cited, plus edits from Diebold, Exxon, and the Church of Scientology. (No word on whether Tom Cruise's IP address has shown up yet.) An employee at Wal-Mart, everyone's favorite employer, edited the entry to say that workers there were underpaid (here).

To be sure, searches on WikiScanner will probably show you that most employees are editing entries on "buttock cleavage" (found on the computers at the US House of Representatives here) or "Hispanic porn stars" (ditto) or "chest hair" (ditto). (Not to be outdone, the US Senate — here — appears interested in "cow tipping," "fast casual dining restaurants," and whether Han shot first in the cantina.) (He did.)

But if your company is big enough to merit its own Wikipedia entry (and by "merit," I mean that you or one of your coworkers wrote one), then you may want to check in with WikiScanner and see if your employees are trashing your company or its customers.

Or maybe they're just sharing "canker-sore stories" (yep, the Senate again).

[Big shout out to Christopher Mirabile, long-time Gruntled reader and idea-generator, for pointing out the WikiScanner phenomenon.]

A two-word corporate blogging policy

OK. So your employees have their own blogs. At first, you thought it was cute. A passing fancy. This year's e-fad.

But now you've realized that the blogs are not going away. And what is more, people are reading them. Reading about your company.

You need to do something. You realize that banning the blogs will just make you and your company look bad. But you need some kind of policy, don't you, or who knows what your employees will write?

That clatter you hear is the sound of legal and HR departments around the world frantically typing up corporate blogging policies. Examples abound. Here are IBM's Blogging Guidelines, a pioneering effort. It's pretty good. Here is Sun's policy; it's very good. Hill & Knowlton's is also quite good. Debbie Weil's excellent The Corporate Blogging Book includes helpful resources and advice, as does her top-notch blog, BlogWrite for CEOs.

On the other hand, Harvard Law School's policy reads exactly how you'd expect Harvard Law School's to read. It actually starts off with an apology ("We don’t mean to turn you off from blogging by immediately inundating you with legalese, but we need to make clear our respective rights and responsibilities related to this service.") — then it inundates us with legalese:

By posting your Content using the Services, you are granting Harvard a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, and worldwide license to use your Content in connection with the operation of the Services, including, without limitation, the license rights to copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, translate and reformat your Content, and/or to incorporate it into a collective work.

(Nothing like a 59-word sentence to inspire you.)

But before you go starting a Corporate Blog Policy Task Force and taking meetings with lawyers, consider what you're really trying to accomplish. You probably want to make sure your employee-bloggers aren't sharing company secrets. Duh. You also want to make sure your employees aren't dissing your customers, or each other. And you probably want to make sure that your workers aren't posting compromising pictures of American Idol contestants on the company blog.

How can you accomplish this without inundating the blogosphere with Harvardesque legalese? With this two-word corporate blogging policy:

"Be professional."

If your employee-bloggers are posting the secret-sauce recipe, bad-mouthing customers, or distributing NSFW (not safe for work) art, fire them. And if you're concerned that your employees won't understand what you mean by "be professional," then you have a management problem or an employee problem. Or both.

IM: "Instant Messaging" or "Incriminate Me (and my company)"?

In 12 years of litigating employment cases for companies, I've learned two axioms of written words:

1. If it's not written down, it didn't happen.
This is why we always tell managers and HR pros to document, document, document everything. (We always say it three times, like it's an incantation or something.) Judges, juries, and agencies tend to believe a witness who says, "I know I talked to her on that date, because I wrote it down here," and then hands over the supporting note. It's not that someone couldn't have written the self-supporting document after the fact; it's just that most people wouldn't do that.

But the second axiom of written words is almost the converse of the first:

2. If it is written down, the person you least want to read it probably will.
(This is related to the First Rule of Litigation, which says that the other side will always learn what you don't want them to learn.)

For years now, companies have been telling people not to send emails that might incriminate themselves or their employers. Even today, people are lulled by the casual nature of email, and they type things they would never set down in a letter or memorandum. Who's going to read it? they ask. The answer is: The person you least want to read it.

Employees who have awoken to the need for prudent emailing still act recklessly when it comes to instant messaging. They take comfort in the knowledge — no, really, just the belief — that most companies don't have the know-how or technology or desire to save IM messages. But just how correct is that belief? The Wall Street Journal's Amol Sharma and Jessica Vascellaro have an excellent article on how IMs are not as private as their senders believe.

The messages could be saved by the recipient. They could be mis-sent, or read by someone else. They could remain on the ISP's servers, the company's network, or the employee's hard drive — all subject to subpoena and discovery. With the Mark Foley scandal tearing up Washington and the H-P pretexting imbroglio roiling Silicon Valley, an employee would have to be stupid to put something incriminating in an IM and think that no one but the recipient will ever see it.

All employers need to have policies in place that tell employees:

• the company owns the computers

• there is no expectation of privacy for anything written on company computers

• they mustn't send any email or IM that they wouldn't want to appear on the front page of The New York Times.

Not having a policy like this is just IM — imprudent management.