My #1 Pet Peeve

 

Product and Performance Reviews. It is incredibly annoying when twenty-four hours after a purchase or visiting an establishment I am asked for a review.  

I buy a lot of books and don’t read books within twenty-four hours. I buy a lot of products and don’t use them in twenty-four hours. I am asked, 'how was my visit was to CVS or Rite Aid or the train station or supermarket or clinic?' I click off immediately. 

Why, you may ask? In certain companies and institutions such as hospitals and factories and many stores, these reviews are used as a measure of performance of the workers there.  

For example, I have firsthand accounts of how reviews are used against nurses to berate them and emotionally whip our heroes into putting heads down and being ashamed of their performance. Not once does management ask the nurses what could be the possibility of a negative review. How realistic is it, especially in hospitals where the patients feel so sick that it is next to impossible to distinguish between good service and bad service. How unfair to nurses.  

That is just one example in one industry where reviews have become the new way of putting pressure on employees unrealistically.  

I have been in many stores and other places of service where you can see the stress on the employees to live up to these unrealistic expectations. So much so that these employees look like monkeys reciting prepared scripts, desperate to get it right and completely insincere. It’s pathetic.  

What happened to performance reviews based on attendance, innovation, leadership, communication skills, teamwork, time management, problem solving, and customer experience.  

I think it is completely unrealistic and unfair to base a performance or product review on a customer survey.  

I will not be part of any employer’s underhanded tactics of using reviews as a performance monitor.  

This practice of asking for reviews is not going anywhere and I see these types of reviews as biased, arbitrary, one sided, and unreasonable and not based on actual experience.   

I don’t know where this practice of asking for reviews will go but I do know that I want no part in hurting any hardworking person.   

Giving no review is a review. The more “no reviews” seen perhaps employers will stop using them as performance/product reviews and go back to actual customer interactions.  

Georgia

11.2021