Work Appraisal in a Time of Covid-19

It’s work appraisal season again. We’ve all done this many times before. This year, though, for reasons we are all too painfully aware of, it’s a little different.

I am at a loss as to how to write up my appraisal sheet. I don’t even know how to start. Truth be told, I can’t even bring myself to start thinking about it, despite the pointed but futile email reminders from HR to get a move on. I’m assuming that’s what those emails were about; I don’t think I even opened them.

For a start, I can barely remember what it is I am meant to have done in the year to date. The only thing I know for certain is that all the grand plans and projects that I committed to at the beginning of the year – well, they all got pretty much scuttled.

These Covid-19 months have been nauseatingly confusing, fraught with anxiety and sadness. As the pandemic took hold, I experienced a sensation that I imagined if the world ended, that would be how I felt. Well, perhaps the world did end. Or a world, at any rate. There was a suffocating feeling in my chest, and a twisting of the gut. I later read that psychologists had discovered that many people, across the world and across all ages, experienced something like that. They gave this sensation a name. It’s called grief.

Some days passed in a disorienting blur, and other days dragged with excruciating mundaneness. Shall I be honest about work in a time of a pandemic?

That during the phase when we were working from home – supposedly working from home, that is – it was a Herculean effort to quell the plaintive and despairing questioning in my head of the point of it all, and to even just turn on the laptop?

That I never realised how much it took out of you to sit with fingers poised expectantly and hovering over the keyboard, while you stared in cloying hope at the stubbornly empty screen that mocked you in turn with the unmoving blinking cursor?

That some days I would be reading the same page of the same article over and over again, and that nothing, absolutely nothing, would stick in my brain? And that on the off-chance I wrote something, I re-read those words as though they were written by a complete stranger?

That some days I just laid on the floor to stare at the ceiling in the middle of a Zoom meeting, mic muted and video off, and felt vindicated in doing so because I imagined the rest of the meeting also drifting off as well?

That it annoyed me no end, positively enraged me, to be receiving well-meaning but tone-deaf messages of faux support and clumsy rah-rah encouragement awash with condescension? You all remember this one, don’t you? “If you come out of Covid-19 not having learned new skills or started a business, you have failed.” Something like that. What a fatal conceit, both literal and figurative, to assume that we will all come out of Covid-19 at all.

Shall I confess to how I gamed the system in order to complete the mandatory e-learning modules that were rolled out by HR during this time, on the off-chance we might be in the mood to learn something strange and new? You know you don’t have to be actually watching the videos in order for the system to register that you have “watched” them, right? And as for the readings-based online assessment? Well, Ctrl-F is such a wonderful invention.

But since I have to appraise my staff as well, shall I also share with you my dilemma over what assessment criteria to use?

How much weight should I assign to their efforts in trying to keep it together, for trying their very best to balance home life and work, and for just showing up for our regular online meetings?

How do I appraise them for the precious human moments when they sent WhatsApp messages to simply ask how I was coping, how my family was? How do I express my gratitude to my crew for the little touch-points before and after each formal meeting: the much-missed banter, the good-natured ribbing, the shit-talking, the meandering chatter that we rely on so much to generate insights and new ideas?

How do I thank them for these little moments of consolation that kept me going – still keep me going – during this time of anomie and chronic lethargy? What value should I assign to the Zoom cocktail hours they indulgently showed up for? Or the meetings about nothing at all? And for the glimpses of their personal lives they generously shared with me through the screen – the rows of sourdough starters in the background, the drums playing in the background by a home-based learning child, the crayon drawings pasted on walls? The long and reluctant good-byes after I declare the meeting over?

How do I appraise them for their patience and tolerance when they send in their work, only for it to get stuck in a chokepoint – me?

No, work appraisal this year is certainly going to be very different, if simply because we must now learn to value all those things we never bothered about before.