It’s yearly review time, and as usual I’m very much enjoying reflecting on all the great things my team have achieved over the last 12 months. There are a couple of fairly new things we have added to our yearly review process that help us focus on the right things, and make the conversations more meaningful to us:
The first is values-based objectives, where we identify behaviours that align with our values, and write objectives that will make us better at consistently demonstrating those behaviours. So if collaboration is a value, then we plan to work with some different people, or if we value transparency then we develop new ways to work in public and share our ideas and decisions as widely as possible. I love this kind of objective, and I think it helps keep the values front and centre throughout the year.
The second is a new one for this year. Over the last few weeks we have started to record how tasks we have completed made us feel, and not just how well they went. Building this into our retrospectives has led to some interesting insights, so we are going to do the same with our yearly objectives. No-one is likely to feel wholly positive about everything they do, but by at least thinking about it we can start to understand the type of work that we prefer, and the things that are likely to require a bit of extra motivation to start. We have been talking about things that make us grateful in our daily stand-up for a while, and this seems like a natural extension.