On evaluations...collaboration, negative bias and peer review

I spent a large part of my life in the military. There I experienced the system of evaluations and feedback from the beginning level to the managerial level. It was an unwritten rule that evaluations be given monthly or situationally, and if they were not on paper, then it was generally considered that it never happened – generally speaking to reiterate. The military had specific forms for lower-level service members, mid-level and so on. As a low-level service member, some of my supervisors abided by this monthly rule sporadically, but always abided by the negative event (the situationally). A situationally evaluation could be negative or positive depending on the event. But, there was a certain bias toward the negative. That is most likely the case, I imagine, in all walks of life. A few negative performances often overshadow a preponderance of positive and sometimes outstanding performances. For this reason, as I became managerial, I tried to make sure to religiously do the monthly evaluations. Granted, I may have fallen victim, or my subordinates had fallen victim, to this general bias toward the negative.

One of the driving forces that made these evaluations troublesome for supervisors was the requirement that these documents be of a certain length, breadth, and format. While one could hand write these forms, handwritten forms were also considered as insignificant. So there was a requirement to use a software system that was not in any way user friendly. In any regard, the whole system was based upon the squeaky wheel getting the most grease, to use an old saying.

A Wikipedia article, “Negative bias” explains this well. It states that “things of a more negative nature (e.g. unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or social interactions, harmful/traumatic events) have a greater effect on one’s psychological state and processes than do neutral or positive things” (Negative bias, 2016).

As I transitioned over to the civilian world, I found this to be true as well. While, my experiences with just on organization do not, and can not, be applied in a general sense to every organization; the experience that I had was an organization that only provided documentation annually, sporadically, and of a very negative nature – writing down the few negatives and ignoring the preponderance of positives.

I believe two things could help with these sort of evaluation systems. The workload of creating documentation of these evaluations is demanding, and there is little authorization for anyone other than a particular supervisor that is allowed to make such evaluations. I suggest that peer evaluations be allowed to lessen the workload on these supervisors who have numerous employees to write up reports on. I also propose user friendly softwares that make the work of documenting performance easier.

Interestingly, the last experience I have had with evaluations, the computer software system allowed for peer evaluations; however, the supervisor would not allow such things and if they were done, that supervisor would override and delete the document. My work had been evaluated twice at 15 minute increments, for a total of 30 minutes per year, by a supervisor. Throw in the human condition of negative bias, my evaluation looked quite horrible and was unrealistic.

Negative bias (2016) . Wikipedia . retrieved August 16, 2016 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias