I gave a talk on Agile Performance Reviews at the South African Scrum Gathering. You can find my slides here:
I also blogged about my idea in a previous post if the slides aren’t explanatory enough.
I also tried an experiment in the session. I handed out performance appraisals to everyone in the room. There were 4 different types, but essentially they were all identical except for the rating. Same salary increase (7% – inflation here), and the same feedback comments.
Scores were either low (2/5), average (3/5) or high (5/5) or there was no score just the salary and feedback.
Afterwards I asked people how they felt about their score, salary and how likely they would be to implement the feedback. Here are the results:
I think I didn’t have enough data to show clear trends (only 10 of each type). I was hoping to show that scores influence how people feel about salaries, i.e. low score meant they felt the salary was unfair, etc. I’m not sure the data shows this conclusively. What is interesting to me is that people who scored high were not as likely to act on improvements. Take a look at the data and see what you think.