Identifying Impact
The impact worksheet lists all the achievements during the tenure of the employee. It is the final step of the performance review framework.
Tip
Here's the impact sheet Reports should be filling these out regularly and discussing it with their managers
Not to overlap with the performance review framework too much, let's dive into the specifics of the sheet and the reasoning behind each column and how it should be filled out. Managers can in turn, explain it to their reports and maximize visibility of the impact each employee is making.
| Column | Description | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Achievement | The core achievement in business terms accompanied by the general solution. | To get the engineer to focus on needle moving accomplishments. |
| Description of Impact | More details on how the achievement was impactful. | Provides context to other managers who may be looking at this person's doc. Makes the engineer focus on their contribution and impact. |
| Alignment with high level objective (OKRs, KPIs, Objectives) | These can be at the company, team or individual | Ensures that leadership is providing the right level of guidance and that employees are aligned with it. |
| Categories | One or more areas that the achievement falls under. More below. | Provides clear examples of what can be considered as evidence or categories of impact. Makes it easier for engineers to collect and think about their evidence. |
| Notes and links | Notes and links out to documentation, dashboards etc that is more detailed. See the spreadsheet for more examples. | In case a deep dive is needed for more details. Especially in case where the achievement is split amongst more than one person. |
Walking Through the Thought Process of One Example
Note
Achievement
Achievement: Increased the reliability of batch job processing by 30%.
Solution: Replaced our in house job scheduler with Argo Workflows.
The achievement itself focuses on the business outcome. In this case, imagine a fictitious digital company that does batch processing jobs in the backend. It spins up a bunch of servers, hundreds to thousands to do some kind of processing, maybe a map reduce. Then it goes away.
Assuming that this is on the public cloud like AWS, GCP or Azure, we're looking at spinning up virtual machines (VMs) and they have an associated startup cost + cost per second/minute.
If processing jobs had a speed up of 30%, that can be correlated with the VM costs, a 30% reduction in cost. You can just check your cloud bill or cost telemetry provider on that type of job to see the actual dollar value in reduction over X months. Not to mention that productivity also increases if it means people aren't waiting around for jobs to finish. In this case, it's about reliability but the idea is similar, albeit a bit harder to measure since you need the failure rate.
The solution is important as well as it tells you how it was done to make it more concrete and real. Engineers will typically do the opposite and say something like "Designed and implemented Argo Workflows for all our use cases". That's not really focusing on the impact.
Note
Description of Impact
- jobs often failed, were not reliably cancellable or stoppable which caused a lot of rework
- researched, architected, and lead the implementation of Argo which increased reliability and reduced human time costs and processing costs by 30%
- saved $15,000 USD a month in processing costs
- completed in 3 months, 1 month ahead of schedule
- lead a team of 3 engineers
This column provides a bit more context to the reader. This could be a round table of managers from other teams who may have no idea what the achievement is about. Succinctly describe the problem so that others can draw a relationship to the impact.
Provide additional details like hard dollar values. 30% is dandy but 30% of a small number might not matter. In this case, $15,000 USD might be even cover the person's entire monthly salary all in one achievement.
It's also important to really distinguish the employee's contribution. It could be a joint project amongst others but some might be doing more heavy lifting than others.
Note
Alignment with High Level objective (OKRs, KPIs, Objectives)
Reliable, stable, cost effective processing
Aligning what achievements with company, team or personal goals is important to keep everyone's eyes on the prize. There's an infinite amount of work to be done and we don't want people doing busy work or work the company doesn't want to focus on.
Everything people do should be aligned to high level objectives in some way, that's why it's a drop down box. It's not to say that a case couldn't be made to not, but that has to be a conscious, deliberate decision where the benefits outweigh the risks.
Note
Categories
Feature, Design, Goal
This is the category or label in which the achievement falls under. It's probably a bit different for every company but here are some to consider:
- Feature: A story, a task or some new functionality to an application
- Design: A design document containing architecture, system changes etc. It's considered technical work and can arguably be more important than features sometimes as it has a multiplier effect.
- Goal: A personal goal or company goal achieved. Guided by managers to make sure they align as much as possible. Completing goals also indicates that the employee is walking the talk.
- Citizenship: Demonstration of good organization citizenship see probation expectations for examples
Note
Notes and Links
Examples include:
- link to code reviews,
- link to design document,
- link to tickets,
- link to dashboards
Additional notes the manager/employee wants to add. It should reference any relevant material that demonstrates this person indeed hit this achievement. It could even be code reviews or design documents to demonstrate their contribution.
Direct Reports Should be the Main Driver of the Impact Sheet
If you can tell that the relationship with the employee is going well and they're going to be working at the company in the foreseeable future, start a levels document that includes the pyramid and impact tabs. Indicate early up front during onboarding time that once things are going smoothly, one will be created to identify gaps and to help the employee grow. This also helps set the expectation on what success looks like and how the company tries to be as objective as possible.
What's different from the levels and pyramid sheet is that the impact sheet should be largely driven by the employee. They know their own work best and should continuously update it. Waiting until a 6 month or 12 month performance cycle before trying to remember back on what happened is very daunting and difficult.
Nobody is going to be more motivated to 'sell' or represent the employee in the best light like the employee themselves. Managers are likely managing multiple reports and would be better utilized to help shape the impact and make sure that it's meaningful stuff listed. It's not meant to be a mirror of a ticketing system -- just big, juicy, needle moving achievements.
The collection itself should be happening months before the performance cycle and finalized before the manager makes use of it.