I feel so much better today Last week my best friend at work was on holiday, and whilst I knew she was still in the UK, I was nevertheless trying not to contact her and interrupt her week off. Restraint isn’t my strongest virtue, but I managed to content myself by sending her an email on Friday afternoon in which I vented my feelings about the entire business in as much depth as it is prudent to vent one’s feelings about senior management in work email Anyway, I got a text from her first thing this morning in which she said she’d just got my email… and she’d been graded as 2 too!

I was obviously upset for her that she’d been given a bad mark, but on the other hand I was so relieved to hear that I wasn’t the only person in the entire office who had been graded below standard, because previously I had assumed it was just me! Her appraisal form read marginally better than mine because she’d only been given twos on four attributes (whereas I think I got about six), but the managers, at a meeting which makes a complete mockery of the entire appraisal process, had already decided she was a two overall before she had so much as written her half of the form! Quite what the point of writing an appraisal is when the outcome has already been decided before you start I have never understood, but that’s the way our firm in its infinite wisdom likes to run things.

Interestingly, my friend had asked our line manager how many people in the office had been graded a two. He allegedly said it was about a third I’ve spent the afternoon running through people in my head and trying to figure out who else could possibly have merited a two. I’m genuinely shocked if that is the case, because this isn’t the way the appraisal system has worked in prior years. I have honestly never heard anyone say either themselves or someone else has been graded less than three. The past two years, it’s been taken for granted that everyone is a three and the office politics and general bitching has just revolved around who was going to be a four and whether they deserved it. The year I joined someone was even graded a five. She was admittedly very talented and later went on to become a manager, but the reason, so the story goes, that she got a five was simply that someone else at her level was given a three despite being a bit crap and they needed to illustrate the difference between them.

In case you think, by the way, that this is all a lot of fuss about a few numbers, I hasten to add that your salary depends on your grade. The standard pay rise goes to those who are graded a three, those who are diligent enough to have earned a four get about a grand more. As to what happens to those who get twos, no one appears to know. I didn’t have the bottle to ask my manager, my friend did and he evaded the question. We all received a circular from National HR today which said that we would be sent a letter with our salary details during the course of July… Hopefully it will be sooner rather than later, because it would be nice to know where we stand. My friend seems to think that the firm is almost legally obliged to give me a payrise because I’m on the verge of proper, fully-fledged qualification. If I didn’t get a qualified salary from September onwards, then she thinks I’d be entitled to make a complaint to the Institute. Her position is somewhat more tenuous, because she still has another exam to sit

We were on the phone for over 45 minutes today, which cut into both our working days somewhat, but I couldn’t hang up because she seemed even more upset by her appraisal than I was by mine. I guess I had the benefit of expecting the result that I got, whereas she was a bit flabbergasted. She hasn’t had a negative appraisal all year, and she hardly ever even gets queries on her work. I, on the other hand, had a bit of a fiasco on one client this year, and as a rule my work is riddled with queries, however well I think I’m doing at preempting them. We compared the attributes where we had been marked down. Interestingly, my friend had also been marked down on “credibility and communication”. I found that surprising, since she’s a rather bubbly sort of person whom one definitely couldn’t accuse of not building a rapport with people in the office. She’s definitely not someone who lacks confidence.

Why a two then? Erm, she talks *too* much! Her objective has been set as the opposite to mine; she needs to increase her credibility with managers in the office by projecting a more quiet and serious image. Whereas managers apparently don’t book me on their jobs because I blend into the background so much they forget I exist, they don’t book her because they think she’s too blonde.

We would both welcome a set of written guidelines as to what constitutes an optimal level of office communication. I really am going to try to improve but I know it’s going to be an upward struggle and that’s not just my fault. On Friday I decided to start as I meant to go on, so I approached the manager for whom I’d been working for the past two weeks to update her on the progress of something I was organising with our largest pension client. I had been sitting four desks away from this woman all week, but rather than speak to me she had emailed me work to do, then emailed me a few hours later to see if I’d finished it. I thought it was fairly clear that she didn’t want a conversation with me, but nevertheless I apologised for interrupting and starting explaining what I wanted to say. I managed about a sentence before she snapped at me saying she didn’t have time for this now and could I go and mend the paper jam in the printer. I did, then I packed my stuff and went home. I wasn’t prepared to sit there after working hours and wait until she could be bothered to listen…

To return to the question of twos and threes for the last time, my friend had a very cynical take on it. She reckons the economic situation means managers are looking to cut costs by grading people lower and thus not incurring the expense of additional payrises. That doesn’t explain my two, but if there is a rash of them in the office this year, there may be something in it. If anyone was going to do something so mean-spirited, it would have to be a firm of accountants!

Tags: appraisals

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