Well, colleagues, have you completed the performance review for 2021? Have you discussed a possible promotion with your superiors? Are you satisfied with the result?

If suddenly it seems to you that performance review is a useless annual hassle, then do not worry. Perhaps you just don’t know how to pass it correctly.

The fact is that performance review has a little-known nuance that radically changes the situation. Everyone says it needs to be passed, but no one says WHERE it needs to be passed.

So, we share a secret: a truly effective performance review is conducted not by your employer, but by anyone else in the same industry. The algorithm is very simple: you respond to a vacancy, pass an interview, and if, according to the results, a new potential employer offers you a significantly higher income, you go with this offer to the old one. Like, so and so, I was offered more elsewhere, I’m leaving you. Further, if the current employer appreciates you enough, he (suddenly) reviews your salary and raises it, and you make a choice - to stay or leave. Well, if he doesn’t appreciate it, then just go to the new one - in any case, you win.

The question is, why is this method much more effective and reliable than going out of your way for a whole year, so that later the manager would still rate your performance as “average”? We answer: while all sorts of losers were vegetating without a normal job in the 90s, truly successful people (to whom, no doubt, the owners of IT companies belong) absorbed all the wisdom of the market economy. And in particular, they watched the Fairy detergent advertisement very carefully, where the announcers gave advice: “If you can’t see the difference, then why pay more?”

And really, why? If you are not going to leave the company, then what difference does it make what kind of performance rating you should put? It is possible to keep you on the same salary from year to year. And on the other hand, if you are going to leave the company for more earnings, then what difference does it make what grade you put on performance review? In the latter case, your productivity is very clearly determined by an offer from another employer, and all these dances around the “degree of compliance with corporate values” and other indicators are just a tribute to fashion.

In addition to such a purely individual approach to raising income, there is also an option to organize a collective performance review, which is popularly called a strike. But in order to massively and successfully apply this skill, employees of the post-Soviet space will have to level up several more times. That’s what we wish you.

Did you have any interesting stories on performance review? Did you receive counter-offers after “going to the side”? Write in the comments.