No Future-Focused Feedback At Mcmaster-Carr

Diagnosis - No Future-Focused Feedback:

There is no structured feedback or performance evaluation process at McMaster-Carr, and few employees answered that expectations are well communicated or that they know what it takes to be successful or get promoted. Instead of using performance review periods to provide future-focused, developmental feedback and to calibrate on expectations and progress toward shared goals, every respondent reported that managers focus exclusively on the past and rely on ambiguous examples heavily skewed toward the negative. Others simply told us that the process is “a joke” or “a mere check the box exercise” with “no chance to provide feedback to management.”

Performance reviews skew more toward mistakes and negative

When focusing additional attention on these employees, managers said they found, “more often than not, their work seems to get worse.” An employee who was “below expectations” stated that they began to question their own decision-making ability and defaulted to asking significantly more questions of their manager because they were treated like they were incapable of making good decisions. Management saw this response as further proof that this employee was a poor decision-maker and couldn’t handle complicated work, so they began assigning easier units and continued to spend more time auditing this employee’s work to catch

Every department has different ways of defining success, and few of these departments utilize objective metrics to back evaluation of performance. Many employees stated that being successful at McMaster-Carr “requires being liked, not doing good work.” Still others stated that they were not even sure what “good work” looked like since “no standards or consistent guidelines exist.” Where guidelines do exist, employees say they are largely useless because “management changes their mind frequently on how strictly they should be followed.” One employee said they feel they are “always chasing a moving target” because “guidelines are rewritten two to three times a week” and, where there is ambiguity, they are told to “use [their] best judgement.” Another said management changes expectations so frequently that “they will tell you to do something one day and criticize you for doing exactly that the following