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Atlassian ditches 'brilliant jerks' in performance review overhaul
Atlassian says it will no longer tolerate "brilliant jerks" who deliver results for the company but make life hell for their co-workers as part of a complete overhaul of how the tech firm conducts performance reviews.
The $47 billion Australian software company, which was founded in Sydney in 2002 and floated on the US stock market in 2015, says two-thirds of every performance review will now have nothing to do with job skills.
Instead, equal weighting will be given to how each of its 3000 employees impacts others on their team, and to how they live the company values. Atlassian says the change will “more fairly measure people on how they bring their whole self to work”.
“Basically over the last 18 to 24 months we have totally changed the way we do performance reviews at the company globally,” Atlassian global head of talent Bek Chee said.
“We recognise things are not the way they used to be, yet companies haven’t evolved (from) 30 years ago when they were primarily made up often of white men. Tech standards have evolved, we have new ways of working, new demographics and generational change.”
Ms Chee said most companies “haven’t looked at their performance systems in a new innovative way”. “We wanted to make sure we were rewarding the right behaviours,” she said.
“One of the things we wanted to make sure we accounted for was the ‘brilliant jerk’ — people who are extremely bright and talented with respect to the way they execute their role but aren’t necessarily concerned with the impact they have on others. We want to make sure our system prevented that.”
Ms Chee said it was “not about people being shuffled out” of the company, but “what it has allowed us to do is really de-bias the performance system” by taking into account an employee’s entire contribution.
[...] Ms Chee said appealing to the millennial and gen Y and Z crowd was “a huge part of this”. “We know the next generation are very socially conscious, they have a different set of expectations. They’re kind of no-bullshit. They don’t want to hear a company say, ‘You can bring your whole self to work, we’re diverse, we’re socially conscious’, and not have that backed up.”
But she stressed that it was not about coddling millennials with a participation-trophy mentality. “Fundamentally this does not change the way we think about high performers. Our top performers we know nail it in terms of living values and being part of the team and delivering in their role,” she said.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @10:23PM (1 child)
Then on top of that. Why would you want a 'brilliant jerk'. A 'brilliant jerk' will build a moat and suddenly bemoan to anyone near them how they are indispensable. Then berate anyone around them for not following their made up rules that no one else gets a say in.
You do not want jerks around. What you want is a 'brilliant nice guy'. Someone who is decent maybe even fun to be around. Helps others and makes sure everything is going better and faster. THAT is the kind of person you want. I have known maybe 2-3 total guys like that ever in my 25+ years. The 'brilliant jerks' a pox on them. They destroyed any teams that were near them.
I am currently in the 'indispensable' position. I am making sure *everyone* on my team knows how this shit works. ASAP. I do not like getting calls in the middle of the night. No one does. Misunderstandings cause most outages. Fix that, and pager duty is a big yawn. After last sundays outage (which caused no real damage). Monday morning was a whole heaping helping of making sure everyone is onboard with the 'you ignored this long enough', including you tech support. I did not mean to do it. It happened by accident though attrition. Which was a wiff on my part and my managers. I am fixing that. My goal at my job is to make sure everyone else can do my job. I *want* to be dispensable. I can then leave this job and not think about it again at some point. I made the point very clear at the start of the meeting 'what if I quit right now what would you do?'. The looks on the managers faces was enough for them to back me up very quickly on my quest for dispensablity.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 19 2019, @11:58PM
That, exactly. Those people who seem to like being indispensable probably don't have a life, and their existence revolves around the faux position they have created within the company. For my own part, whatever I might be doing on my personal time is at least as important, and almost always more important, than running in to work to fix some screw up. That became even more true when the company moved, doubling my travel distance to work. To be called in takes a minimum four hour bite out of my personal time. Don't call me, call anyone who lives closer, who can perform the same tasks, and only lose an hour or two out of their personal time!