Designing our performance reviews was more involved than we initially realized. It wasn't as simple as slapping together a number of questions to ask; we needed to design an entire system to conduct performance reviews. To this end, we made a Google Form where team members could evaluate each other by giving ratings and comments in a variety of categories. Each team member also had a total of 100 points to distribute to their teammates. This meant we could not distribute points completely evenly; someone was definitely going to receive more. This encouraged us to give points truly based on an individual's performance as opposed to just evenly dealing out points.
When it came to the actual process of reviewing each other, we needed a system that would ensure anonymity of responses so that e.g. a reader wouldn't know from whom negative feedback or a low score came from. We solved this by employing a third party: a classmate who would compile submitted feedback and organized it by individual.
The system worked well for our first performance review, and I'm expecting we'll use it again for the final review. Having all team members submitting reviews provided us the feedback Katz describes as "360-degrees": a performance appraisal system involving not only one's peers but a person's manager and/or subordinates as well. For simplicity, we didn't use an essay appraisal style, but I could see it being applicable in situations where more depth is needed. Our current system serves both an informative and developmental purpose: it allows a reviewee to know whether they've been doing good or not overall and where their strengths and weaknesses lie. The only thing it lacks is an administrative purpose, i.e. stating whether the person deserves to be moved, promoted, fired, etc. That is obviously beyond the scope of the exercise, but it would still be interesting to have those options discussed as if it were a real-life work situation.
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