I somehow missed this but I‘m really interested (will eventually have to professionalize such thing). How exactly did you spend those hours? Was that useful (generally, as a task. Not you specifically rather doing something else)? How do those horse trades exactly work? How much additional time and usefulness (generally, etc…) would those have taken?
Because I am cynical and critical of the entire performance review process I would say not useful. I subscribe to a management podcast. Performance reviews were what 20th century organisations adopted because the military was one of the first organisations of people. It was used in the military to determine successors. Now it is some contrived process you throw people into because you need to have something that is simultaneously transparent and opaque.
In my current company, we take all VPs and above, then all Directors and above, then all Managers and above in groups. The performance calibration session is your peers and one level above. You have a spreadsheet of their competency (How), aggregated rating of their assigned performance objective results (What) and the combined rating. Then you have the bonus payout % driven by the bands of the rating. (95 percent to 110 percent, 110 and above, etc). The manager submitted all these ahead of time. Someone in HR who consolidated it is typically appointed as the live editor. Usually each year the company is assigned a distribution target. No more than 10% can be exceeds. 80% met their target. 10% can be below target. The rankings are 1 to 3. The ratings submitted by the managers for this group are usually plotted on the graph to figure out visually if we met the distribution target.
Then you proceed between each manager peer to describe their people and what they rated. Alternatively you can go over all exceeds, all below target and then lastly the meets. A good manager prepares some commentary on their accomplishments, interactions with other teams, and overall value to the company's direction, strategy or P&L. If you are pushing for exceed or eventual promotion you might have pre wired ahead of the session with other peers so they agree. Then afterwards the facilitator usually asks if there are objections. This commentary is all anecdotal and people who make comments don't even know what objectives you assigned to your people never mind the metrics achieved.
Typically group think prevails. If there is one strong character who says this person isn't exceed or meets, others will chime in to reinforce it and the employee gets knocked down. If there are two departments heads that don't co-operate then there will be an axe to grind. Sometimes (more rare) people might say you forgot he or she saved my ass on A or B. And try to get it pushed up. Those who get moved down will concede by saying they accept the group's judgment and will convey this feedback to correct them for next time. Or they will "performance manage" the affected employee. The group think rating will send a message to the employee is another popular saying. If you want one of your staff in the exceed category you are usually willing to throw one of your meets under the bus or you nominate two or three exceed with full knowledge only one will make it. If you want others to agree with your exceeds employee you try to save their people from being knocked down or agree with their exceed rating for their preferred person. You can also claim flight risk to try to maintain or reward an employee but smarter participants will want retention as a topic for discussion outside of this. Historical ratings are also discussed. If someone has been exceeds for 2 or 3 cycles, others will find ways to say high performance is now just normal performance.
95% of the time the results come in with too many people in exceeds and no one ranked below target unless they were fired, resigned, or transferred. You need to throw some people in there to meet the distribution target.
If it is a 3 hour session and you have 20 people to discus, most discussion will be about the 5 people for 2 hours. Then the facilitator will realise there is no time left and people will rush through their favourites or the bad apples and then you barely gloss over the people who just meet expectations. Maybe you'll go back and adjust one person who was riding the positive or negative momentum at the beginning of the session.
At the end we tally the bonus percentage column to make sure we didn't exceed the designated bonus budget from Finance.
In my previous company the bonus payouts were fixed based on a scale of 1 to 5. It was called performance panel and it started with managers, directors, AVP/VP, CxO all in one room reviewing all the people below manager. The point of having everyone was to try to figure out who marked people easy and who (more rare) marked people too hard. The same haggling happened. This went on the entire day because once the managers were finished with their staff, the managers vacated the room and the directors talked about the managers. As you move up you have fewer people to discuss in the group so you can get to more specifics. But the same group think, horse trading, sh%tting on people in teams you had a grudge with, etc happened. Then all the directors vacated and the discussion goes up one level.
The same distribution curve applied. My old company would never let anyone who joined mid year be rated as meets expectation because they need to be on the job for a year. Your bonus is therefore a partial pay out even if you did everything right. You had to actively find people to throw under the bus as below target because people fired or resigned don't count as cannon fodder for below target. Any exceed rating was always challenged with a comment from the facilitator or peer, "is that above and beyond or part of their job description"
One gracious thing is the CxO head of the function had authority to ask who in this group was the shining beacon of the team. That person received a maximum exceeds rating of 5. This wasn't counted against the targets. It was the perogrative of the head of function.
My first company called it performance rankings I think. I was a lowly manager so all I did was submit all my folks to my boss and she would knock the ratings around in front of me in a spreadsheet. Then I think she took it to her peers and some process transpired there. There wasn't a distribution target but in a performance scale of 1 to 5, it was known getting a 5 meant you flew to home office and attended the chairman and CEO award for a Platinum level prize. One of the VPs at the time had an aspiring high potential manager. But he said to everyone including the manager that he would never award a 5. He was a coloured man and told the manager, a white man, you will have to lick my ass so much that it turns white before I put you up for that.
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