Employee Survival Guide® - Performance Reviews Are Now Controlled By AI and Provide Constant Feedback

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

Could an algorithm determine your career future? We're peering into the transformative world of AI-driven employee performance reviews, dissecting the complexities and the concerns they introduce into the workplace. This episode takes a hard look at the implications of replacing traditional performance evaluations with AI's continuous feedback loop, as highlighted by the Wall Street Journal. There's a lingering question about whether this technology could unfairly influence terminations rather than enhancing fairness and transparency. With a critical lens, we navigate the murky waters of AI transparency, the programmers behind the curtain, and the potential biases that machines could perpetuate. It's a conversation about the trust deficit between American workers and management, and how genuine employee engagement is about more than surveillance—it's about building a fundamental trust that no AI can replicate.Links:The Performance Review is Dying. Make Way for a Firehose of FeedbackThe Movie "Her"2001 a Space Odyssey- Hal"The State of the Union is Not Good"  If you enjoyed this episode of the Employee Survival Guide please like us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We would really appreciate if you could leave a review of this podcast on your favorite podcast player such as Apple Podcasts. Leaving a review will inform other listeners you found the content on this podcast is important in the area of employment law in the United States. For more information, please contact our employment attorneys at Carey & Associates, P.C. at 203-255-4150, www.capclaw.com.

Hey, it's Mark here and welcome to the next edition of the Employee Survival Guide, where I tell you, as always, what your employer does definitely not want you to know about, and a lot more. It's Mark here and welcome to the next edition of the Employee Survival Guide. Today's article or topic is going to be, Performance Reviews are now controlled by AI, artificial intelligence, and provide constant feedback. Like everything these days, businesses are tinkering with AI.

Employers are now infusing generative AI into performance reviews. The Wall Street Journal ran an article today that I read. It titled it, Performance Review is Dying. Make Way for a Firehose of Feedback. Obviously, if you know my employment philosophy via these podcasts, the title of the article sang to me in so many humorous ways. We already know that performance reviews do not work and only paper a trail for employers to eventually terminate employees. Now the stakes are even higher, and the job has become harder for employees. Previously, employees had to contend with a supervisor who had no training regarding

performance management of employees to rate their annual performance review. Today's performance review is highly subjective, broad, brusque criticism of employee performance, and not grounded in facts and even reality in some cases. I often see performance reviews containing supervisor comments about the way the employee communicates to coworkers or how they are disengaged during meetings, or vague comments reflecting negatively on the employee's performance. I do see some good performance reviews, I will say. I'm not completely insane, but majority of the time I'm seeing negative or basically fictional reviews designed to set somebody up for termination. With the advent of AI, the employee now must deal with a computer in real time to assess their performance, a truly utopian experiment for sure. My mind is filled with comedic thoughts on the various futuristic

examples the new performance review will take. Will it be the female AI voice of Scarlett Johansson from the movie Her, probing your innermost secretive feelings? Will it be the voice of Hal from my favorite movie, the 2001 Space Odyssey? And in that movie, we see a sort of performance review play out where the employee is given a negative review by Hal. I'm not kidding, and it's worth a two-minute listen. And I'll include the links to the show notes to the YouTube videos. You can watch it. The alleged argument about using generative AI, firehose, performance feedback is to create more transparency amongst employees and management.

More transparency amongst employees and management. and management. More transparency amongst employees and management. If that doesn't bug you, it should, because there's no transparency in the corporate American workplace today. The idea here, supposedly, is if the AI computer constantly assesses employees' performance, both the good, the bad, and the ugly, somehow everything will become transparent and more efficient. Yeah, right. I see one problem here. Who writes the code to input into the AI learning device? A human. Where is the AI device going to machine learn from?

Management teams filled with more humans. Guess who the coders, the employers, and the management managers left out of the creative development of the machine learning bot? Employees, good. Now you're learning faster than the AI device that will soon evaluate your performance. Are you a wee bit concerned about all this? You should be.

If the Firehose approach to performance feedback generates transparency, what type of transparency are we talking about here? Will the AI bot assess and rate variability of implicit bias in the employee behavior? And I'm not in favor of implicit bias testing in DEI, and that's a topic for another podcast that will be coming up shortly. Will a device pick up on microaggressions amongst employees and report to the human resources department in real time? That's scary.

Here's a good one. Will the AI performance review pick up on the employee using an AI device himself to respond to the AI performance review management criticism? And then in the end, we can all sabotage the performance review process by simply making shit up. Because that is what's happening anyway today by management when they rate people in their performance reviews, they're making shit up. The thought provprovoking questions here are endless, but you get to the point. The bottom line about generative AI performance

management is that employers are not going to seek the transparency to help protect employees from unequal discriminatory behavior. The opposite is in fact true. Generative AI performance reviews are the next step too far over the precipice of default management tactics. Employers will be collecting data on all aspects of employee performance, including whether or not their mouse moved on the desk in order to assess if they're actually working on

or collecting video clips from their laptop to discern or scrape, is the term that AI uses, scrape data from the work environment or worse yet, from the home environment. Remember that one during COVID? Yes, of course, I'm gaslighting generative AI performance reviews because it deserves it.

No one else is attacking the subject with extreme distrust. Given the Wall Street Journal article above, even the Wall Street Journal article above, even the Wall Street Journal article above demonstrates mere child's play criticism of the new management toy of destruction. I like that phrase when I created it, sorry. Employers deserve it because employers constantly lose sight of the gold standard of employee engagement. You ever hear the phrase employee engagement?

If you Google it, try Googling it, employee engagement? If you Google it, then try Googling it, employee engagement. All you'll see, and I do this all the time because it frustrates me. You'll see employee engagement companies, consultants.

You won't see employee engagement talking about the word trust, meaning the stuff you really want the employer to treat you like and to create trust with you. So, all right, back to the podcast. Building trust amongst employees. I'm sorry.

The gold standard for employee engagement is building trust amongst the dehumanized human capital we call the American workforce. Obviously, you know I load all my sentences with thought-provoking words because I intentionally want to make you think about that. Dehumanized capital, human capital. It's, you know, you're just a number. That same workforce that supports the Google and NVIDIA stock price today and tomorrow. NVIDIA stock is going through the roof today, folks. Oh, I can go on and on here. The American workforce does not trust management, and they have a good reason not to

especially when they can be fired at will at any time forced into overbroad and illegal non-compete agreements but wait the Federal Trade Commission we need your answer about this issue and slam down the rabbit hole of hell called the forced arbitration

except sex discrimination and thanks to Gretchen Carlson for really standing up and giving the big thumb down to corporate America. Unfortunately, quote, the state of the union is not good. It's also a link in the show notes too. It's actually President Ford talking about the state of the union. Employees that I'm speaking with

never have anything good to say about employers. Why in the heck is that? And I'll just segue into this. And it is a part of what I do, and it's a part of, obviously, a larger theme that's going on here. But who in the world is protecting you? I mean, where? Who? Name an organization.

No, not the union. Jeez, everybody says unions and drives me crazy. They don't do anything. They only represent about less than 10% of the population. That leaves 90% of you. Who is out there protecting you? Advising you? Telling you the right and wrong about what employers are screwing you with,

you know, undermining you. It's like dating a bad date or a bad marriage. It's just like lie, cheat, and steal. That's what employers do. Oh, I'm sorry. You work for a company and you're really loyal and you're happy there and nice friends and you have work friends and all that stuff. But wait a minute, you just got fired today. It's Friday. I do the podcasts on Fridays typically. I don't know why, but I get calls on Fridays and people get fired. And I got a couple of calls today because people got fired today. So when you get fired, you're not feeling so hot about your employer because you just were flipped off the spreadsheet of the reduction in force because you're just a number in the dehumanized human capital that you really represent to the

Private equity firm that holds the investment in your in your company and wants to flip you and sell you so Who's really protecting you here? the federal government Well, they have the EEOC the the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Department of Labor, and in some respect, the Security Exchange Commission, if you're a whistleblower. But are they really holding your hand and helping you on a day-to-day basis like this? The answer is no. There's no one out there. Zero. Nothing. There's the internet. You can go search it, get a lot of crap, But who's out there to help you? The problem in the State of the Union today is that no one is addressing this concern. I could probably make a lot of money selling my consultancy to the political parties to drum up the election. We have an election coming up because no one really addresses the issue of employees.

because no one really addresses the issue of employees. It's Trump, immigration, it's a couple of wars. What about you? I mean, you guys vote. So the point is they don't want to take care of you and they want to let you just fumble your way through and figure it out. That is the common default that employers want you to feel like um hence the reason why

the podcast i have it says i tell you everything you want to know what your employer doesn't want to tell you and a lot more because that was the purpose of it employers don't want to help you and you got to help yourself and i guess that's the bottom line point here is, are you helping yourself? Are you becoming more educated about what I'm talking about in the podcast? Are you educated about the laws? This past week, I heard somebody call in and he used the phrase to me that it stuck in my head all day. It's like, it bugged me all week. I'm like, social justice. And I can't tell you about the call we had but he referenced it was raised obviously relation to employment but you know social justice and he was concerned about that social justice and in writing the wrong and causing the employer to

amend uh for its its wrongdoing on him social justice is really about you and your ability to understand the rules of engagement finally to listen don't you're not going to get it on tiktok you're not going to get it on instagram you're going to have to read open your mind it's all there in front of you i've laid it out for you there's tons of podcasts for you it's all the the truth. I'm not making this shit up. It's real. 28 years later and too many thousands of people have dealt with. I've come to a consensus. Here you have it. It's all there for you. So listen, learn, explore. Don't go in there with your head in the sand at an employer and just think that you're powerless and just realize you actually have some leverage with your employer. So do some reading, educate yourself, listen to both sides. Of course,

that's always the democratic way to do it. Find your voice in your employer and find some social justice if you need to. Sometimes it may cost you your job, but that's social justice when you call out your employer. Because social justice in my book, just have to give it to you because I really kind of live for this. Social justice to me is when I write an affidavit for a client or the client really writes it and we send it to the employer and we say to the employer, we're going to disclose this in a federal court proceeding. And we're going to disclose all of your stuff, all the crap that you just dumped on this employee, thinking that no one would ever notice. And that's how it happens every single time.

I'm a lower voice, yeah, but boy, I'm really super pissed, but I feel great when I do this because I've taken down some pretty large people and I take down is defined as make them pay a lot of money to the client. And we're not just talking a couple hundred thousand dollars. So I do real social justice through the work we do. Sometimes it just doesn't hit the public press. I'm sorry, but sometimes that's what the client wants, and I have to follow what the client wants. But still, it's success, it's social justice, and it's reconciliation, and it's the ability for the employee themselves to just tell the employer what they really thought happened to them, and we provide that voice to them. And that is social justice in some way. And you can define any way you want,

but we're really taking to the man and we just, we're very quiet about it sometimes loud, but that's it. So I know we segued a little bit, but I get really impassioned about this or passionate about it. So here you have a performance review issue and you have a computer. I'd be scared shitless. So until next time, enjoy. If you like the Employee Survival Guide, I'd really encourage you to leave a review.

We try really hard to produce information to you that's informative, that's timely, that you can actually use and solve problems on your own and at your employment. So if you'd like to leave a review anywhere you listen to our podcast, please do so. And leave five stars because anything less than five is really not as good, right? I'll keep it up. I'll keep the standards up. I'll keep the information flowing at you. If you'd like to send me an email and ask me a question, I'll actually review it and post it on there. You can send it to MCARUY at CAPCLaw.com. That's CAPCLaw.com.