In what I think is a rather unusual twist to the performance and peer review process, the Canadian website Coworkers.com is a community of users that seems to focus on the peer review.
There are several problems with this that I can see. First of all, these are unsolicited reviews for the most part. While there is a mechanism for a person to register on the site and request reviews from people, most reviews of this type will probably be facilitated through a non-public, behind the firewall process. Certainly if I’m soliciting peer reviews, I’d like to ensure that people can give me feedback that I can act upon, but also that it’s fairly private since the entire world (literally) doesn’t need to know about my work performance.
Second, the people with the most motivation to post something on-line are the people with negative reviews. This means that a person with several reviews will have a large amount of negative bias built into the process. I’m all for feedback, but I don’t think this is the best way to facilitate it.
Third, since these are anonymous reviews, there is really nothing saying that the reviews are accurate, meaningful, or thoughtful in any way. That really takes all the value out of the content. I’m all for anonymity when it’s needed. Sometimes you just need to have anonymous surveys such as when you do your annual employee engagement survey. And of course when you’re surveying a group of people who currently work with you or for you, this might also be meaningful as the defined set of reviewers is known. However, when someone who may have worked with you 20 years ago and has an axe to grind is allowed to post negative comments, that needs to be somehow controlled.
In my opinion, this is taking open collaboration and community one step too far. Reviews should be a private thing. If you don’t have the guts to provide negative feedback to someone to their face, certainly don’t do it on-line anonymously where they have no chance to respond or correct their actions since they may not know the complete context.
