AI and Your Performance Evaluation

Quite a few years ago, I wrote a somewhat long-winded article about my thoughts on performance evaluation and the processes that should surround it. In the intervening years, AI has risen to mainstream use and is within reach of any person who desires to engage with it. While a performance evaluation from the side of the employee hasn't changed in its form, now it can be less arduous with the use of our robot friends.

In my original article, I wrote about the broader environment in which your evaluation exists. That is, it exists within a set of goals, targets or behaviors that your organization should provide. What I did not discuss was an effective form that you, the writer, might find useful. When guiding my team through the process, I often recommend a basic formula.

• State the thing you did
• State what doing that thing accomplished (ideally quantifiable)
• State why that thing hits your performance target or somehow provides value to the organization.

Something like this:

Under my leadership my team successfully completed the implementation of our new platform which reduced overall workload by 15% and increased the organizations visibility potential issues of which aligns with the strategic goals of reducing cost as well as reducing defects and issues.

Assuming that you have a rough list of the past few month's accomplishments, you can leverage a tool like ChatGPT (though there are MANY others) to do the hard work of crafting the appropriate verbiage.

Experience has taught me that many people are pretty good at their jobs, but many people struggle with articulating what they have done. Furthermore, lacking a form that is manager-friendly and consistent, creating the text of their performance evaluation can be challenging.

So now we can take a few things you've done, and use them as inputs, modify our prompt so that your AI of choice can use it as a guide and you can reduce the toil spent on writing to a minimum!

Of course, you will want to selectively edit what you get and you may need to re-prompt your favorite robot as needed.

In the end, it's not going to do your work for you, nor can it read your mind, but it can be a very effective way to reduce the time spent and create a sense of coherence in what you've submitted.

One word of caution, be sure not to feed it any sensitive data about your company. Just remember, these AI tools are owned by their creators and once you feed it data, there is a good chance that they can review it, log it, track it, keep it or resell it. You could replace any specific keywords or company-specific items with dummy terms that you can replace after you get the output you need.

Please note, no robots were used in the process of writing this article, all ideas were produced with my own meaty little fingers.