Portfolio of Keith Elder

Tips for Writing Your DRIVE Reviews

by Keith Elder

Track Your Work

Before a review can be written the team member must remember all of their accomplishments. Year-end reviews can feel like a daunting task. Preparation is the key to lightening this burden. The best way to prepare is to continuously keep track of your work. Here are a few tips on how to keep track of your work throughout each quarter and for the year.

Selecting a Trusted Source

In the book Getting Things Done by David Allen, David talks about a trusted source. A trusted source is merely a place where you put things. In the context of the book it is a place where all of your tasks live. In the context of reviews it is a place where our digital notes will be stored.

There are a multitude of ways to store digital information. The tool you select should minimally support bullet points and pasting of screen-shots. Here are a couple choices that already come on our work computers and how to use them.

  • Word - create one file per year using this template
  • OneNote - create a DRIVE notebook and use this template to create a section for each year

Creating a Habit

Once you have Word or OneNote setup with the template, it is just a matter of remembering to add items to the relative sections as tasks are completed. This should be done in as real-time as possible with a minimum one week interval. A habit will have to be created to remember to update this document. That is the hardest part of this entire process. Remembering to update the document. In the book, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, he covers what habits are, how to create them, and how to leverage them in new ways. I highly recommend this for those that struggle with remembering to update their template. One way to help create the habit is to create a tickler as noted by David Allen. Which is another way of saying to create a reminder in your calendar.

Writing the Review

If you leverage the above template and form a habit of keeping it updated, writing the review becomes trivial. All that needs to be done is cleanup. The formatting is ready to be copied and pasted into the DRIVE tool within each section.

The only piece you should have to write is the performance paragraph. This paragraph should surmise the work you've done in culture, contributions and competency to support the DRIVE rating you are selecting. Within the FAQ section of DRIVE are some PDFs that can help determine which rating should be selected. The Ratings Definitions 3Cs is particularly useful to review as well as your role responsibilities before assigning your overall rating. Role responsibilities can be downloaded from Workday if you do not have a copy on hand.

Tips

Here are some tips to help you write a better review.

  1. The review should not be a single list of bullet points. Use indentation when writing out your bullet points. Make them easy to read. For example, if you worked on a project, that should be a bullet point. Under that, indent and list the items you accomplished. Try not to go over three levels deep with your bullet points.
  2. Leave the ISMs that are in the template. List how you lived a particular ISM by selecting actions from contributions or competency. For ISMs that do not have anything listed underneath when it comes review time, remove them.
  3. Stick to bullet points. Within the culture, contributions, and competency sections known as the 3C's, avoid writing paragraphs. Writing paragraphs tends to introduce more emotions into the review. An example of this might be: "I feel I did a good job this quarter." It is great the person feels great about their work, but without having definitive points in one of the three sections, it is just lip service.
  4. Focus on the facts and introduce stats when you can. For example, you might have a bullet point that says how many stories you worked on in a given quarter. Or the performance load testing of something built. Metrics are great.
  5. Include iOKRs. Any progress on your individual iOKRs should be highlighted.
  6. The performance paragraph should drive why the rating that was selected was selected. I call this the "looking in the mirror" paragraph because it forces the writer to face the facts of their review and give a more concise rating rather than an inflated one.

Sample

CULTURE

  • Innovation is rewarded. Execution is Worshipped.
    • The thing I did to support the ISM above.

CONTRIBUTIONS

  • The thing I did
    • The sub part I did
      • The other sub-part I did

COMPETENCY

  • A thing I did to increase my knowledge

Performance Paragraph

Why you selected the rating you selected based on the 3C's above.