Annual appraisals
The army caught this disease about 15 years ago, In 1993 they announced a huge redundancy programme and in 1994 my boss asked me to pop in for a "chat" about my annual appraisal. Asked me what my personal goals for the next 12 months were, and then got tetchy when I pointed out that, as a middle ranking officer I stood a 50/50 chance of being made redundant, so my personal goal for the next year was survival. ( I got made redundant 6 months later. They gave me 2 years salary, tax free, to go away. 18 months later they asked me to go back and I served another 8 years before hanging up my boots when I wanted to! What a waste of time and money.) Anyway, by that time the whole acronym ridden platitudinous crap that infests civilian HR dealings had transfered to the military, and annual reports had become a time wasting exercise.
Mindless and meaningless.
What's the first thing you learn about common sense?
That it's not common.
Prior to the 90's we had useful annual reports that, at the very least, gave you an idea of peoples capabilities, or lack of them. famous, if probably apocryphal, examples included:
"I would hesitate to breed from this officer"
"His men will follow him anywhere, mainly out of curiosity"
"Lt B**** has tried hard to get to grips with his job this year, and has learned to ride a bicycle"
. Actually, my issue with it is not the thing itself, but the culture in which the act of producing documents is more important than the content of the documents themselves. Writing situational analyses about an organisation I've worked for for 10 years is a walk in the park, as well as a fairly interesting exercise. The trouble is, the document of which the last one was a part will now go before people who will notionally base decisions on it, without reading it very carefully (or indeed at all).
