A quiet weekday

As I drove in to my office vicinity this morning, I was feeling rather austere since I can sense the quiet and still air with only sounds of birds chirping. What’s ahead for me will be a week of hushed ambiance with only a handful of us working here. However, I had my agenda planned out well to fit for the week. Besides my principle project on my schedule which is topping the priority directory, I was assigned to do DNA profiling for a subset of samples shipped into our lab 2 weeks ago to verify its distinctiveness as an air of doubt was clouding us in our recent data analysis performed.
When I finish a project in hand, I find it slightly tricky to right away get started on something new. My mind simply needs a break to refresh and slowly absorb to the new task seamlessly. So after spending days prepping for my next pipeline, I was a bit sluggish getting into the office. Rather than thinking of judgment calls, I spent the morning preoccupied with something that I do not find so straightforward: legal memorandum of understanding (MoU). Especially those part of research information that may be exploited by the service provider. Time to ponder on the nitty-gritty details of confidentiality as we are fast pacing into the crucial element of the work.
Do you see the headache I can get into? Well, I poured myself with some white coffee and made myself comfortable in my chair ready to draw out my framework. The mere thought of the exciting outcome from this project to benefit our plantation counterpart, it drew a smile on my face and a satisfying joy to my heart. As a scientist, nothing is more precious than bringing goodness to mankind.
On a more pleasant note, I made plan for a little celebration in conjunction with my aunt birthday. I am thinking of making her happy as every year is a milestone for her (since she is a cancer patient and in healing stage). The love and inspiration to drive her to make a living that she wanted to.

This will be my aunt’s second birthday which I think I had celebrated for her (the first during her chemo treatment period). I really am looking forward to it.

It's Thursday already!

It seems like it was just yesterday I was feeling Monday slump. I was looking forward for the weekends. Then I realize this week has zoom by! My goodness I can barely keep up! It’s already Thursday. I can't believe how time flies. A little too quick actually that I almost got lost in between. When you’re super busy, even the time that speeds by totally caught me off guard. I had to ask myself, where did the week go? I really had no idea and was speechless for a second. My brains went blank for jiffy trying to recap the series of events that took place over the second week of July.

It is all about work, work and work since the last SAC convention. My research on shell fruit form has proved to be of interest for the breeders and geneticist lately due to its economic importance as well as it can be incorporated into the breeding programme in near future since the potential genetic markers has been fished out. However, there are some validation experimentation conducted and further fine mapping to get the closest and tightly linked markers to be incorporated for field testing. So here you go! I have been burning the midnight oil doing some literature landscape, frequent discussion with project leader and getting ideas from consultants to steer forward the program. It has been exciting though!

So that explains why this week I had to juggle between in-silico analysis and lab work to test one DNA marker that has been giving me a tough time by not showing up itself on the genotype profile. I was too engrossed into my work. But felt even busier due to the sluggish weather that triggered my rhinitis which made me feel worse as I was challenged by bouts of sneezing and congested nose. I thought that if I'm still feeling miserable over the next few days, I might as well give in and go to my panel doctor at SDMC to get my regular dose of nasal spray.

In midst of all this, Thursday rolls just about silently, and I quietly hoped for the weekend to come by as I am pretty exhausted from the week and in dire need of some sound rest (to be precise, my sleep!). A simply quiet and relaxing weekend plan will be the right thing that I need now. Maybe a nice dinner with family, catch a movie, and maybe cupcake project!

It’s Monday and there is so much to do yet I feel the drag

I promised myself last night that I will put on my best attitude and a wide smile for Monday (and not to be moody). Yet once again it was a failed effort no matter how hard I tried.  You know the usual attributes with the blues, sulky and feeling lost. To make things worse, it has been super busy period for past couple of weeks where I have way too much work, because of all the work I need to do in the coming weeks. Last Friday I put off some on hold till Monday comes because I was simply too sluggish, tired and looking forward to the weekend. Come what may, I believed that Monday would make it all better.

When the alarm rang at 6am on Monday morning, I wake up with a heavy heart and hollow feeling hating life and work and everything about it that might be responsible for me being moody. Here it goes my typical Monday in the not-so-good ambiance. I kicked off my blanket, got out of bed, took a shower thinking it might help to cheer me up by the time I step outta my house for work. Only to find it didn’t make a difference at all. Now, finally awake and aware this is how my life is and I have to go on even though it’s a drag. Perhaps, it is just about the thoughts and I quickly made an effort to jazz up my spirits with some inspiring thoughts, listening to the whacky Djs of FlyFm radio station and also fast beat songs that somehow kicked my energy level. Now I need to get my ass down to working and keeping my mind focused. 

One thing that got me perked up was the victory of my favorite Spain team. Viva la Espana! I and my husband were excitedly discussing about Spain’s players line-up and predicted that they will be the Euro 2012 winner with their top form of players. Spain has yet again proved their skills and the glory is shining ever since the last World Cup. My husband was amazed that I watch football not for good looking players but more into the quintessence of the game. I admit I don’t really know the nitty-gritty details of football rules but I can make with what it is about fairly. Since my husband is an avid football fan, he got excited when he knew I do enjoy football to some extent and he believes that I would be his best companion in near future (also to refill his coffee/snacks/ bites, hehehe).

Just as I step into the office, while grabbing my usual coffee from the coffee maker, I just realize how challenging one’s life can be. Most of my friends are married, some with a child and some still savoring their singlehood. Some of us have a stable career of passion; some still studying (God knows till when) and some are still job-hopping. Suddenly I feel most of us are already hitting the 30s and time to plan for a more secured life in terms of career development, fiscal future and also family life. Oh no! So many things are running up and about in my little head and this was definitely not my normal Monday. What has got into me? Perhaps it all popped from last week’s brainstorming discussions. My career is moving into a more challenging phase with the next 6 months. My marital life needs a clear direction as it is fairly difficult to live far away from my sweetheart. We both need each other so much as well as getting into the family life ahead.  

But we both are very understanding when it comes to our life planning. My husband is very encouraging and aspiring when it comes to progress in life for a better future. Hope this is not for too long. Missed you more than ever today.

Love-Hate with performance appraisals

Once again it’s time for me to finally wrap up my FY by profiling the performance review into Sime Darby’s People Talent Portal. It’s like a football season where everyone walks in and out the meeting rooms with shots of coffee and laptops projecting their performance progress for their management team to evaluate individually how they fared in their task. I must acknowledge that my company has successfully designed a great system to recognize their employee’s talents and performance in their respective division for these two years since it was introduced in late 2010. Before that the performance appraisals went through many facets of changes that kept us wondering what the HR guys were doing! Apparently they failed in their KPIs for not developing a good KPI system for their employee.

The onset of this Talent Portal, most of us was in ambiguity since we didn’t understand a single thing even after their road show to brief us on the use and reason on why the HR implemented this system. Again they failed! Eventually when we began using it bit by bit and understanding the different aspects of this portal as time goes by that we finally appreciated it. However good it can be but the mere thought of going through 4 quarters of performance review with a panel of managers, self rating for your performance review and justifications for your competencies of the entire FY and worse thing is the KPI calibration meeting (which managers try to pull us down/up based on their liking) is painful and insidious. I guess most of the employee faces this same nightmare regularly. But why is this happening?

Traditional performance appraisals don't work for lots of reasons. It is more like a corporate sham whereby the exercise is the most insidious, tedious yet it has been a must-have in every organization performance evaluation system. Everyone does it and I believe almost everyone who has gone through it hates it so much. Many times we being scientists have raised the questions regarding the unfair performance evaluation for R&D to our director during our regular ‘Teh Tarik session’. How can you gauge a research executive if we accomplish our task (research project) in time but didn’t obtain the deliverables that we anticipate? Do you penalize us for the nature of science or acknowledge the effort and contribution? Reviewing performance is good; it should happen every day. But employees need evaluations they can believe, not the fraudulent ones they receive. They need evaluations that are dictated by need, not a date on the calendar. They need evaluations that make them strive to improve, not pretend they are perfect. Sadly, most managers are oblivious to the confusion they cause with performance reviews. To some extent, they don't know any better: This is how performance reviews have been done, and this is how they will be done. Since most bosses are told they can't give everyone top grades.

Ideally, a performance review is a key indicator of each and every employee’s performance objectively. However this is not the scenario in reality. This has become the practice of management domination where they send a message to their employees that the management’s opinion on our performance is the final call for career development, determinant of salary rise, perks etc. This exercise which was supposedly objective but I can tell you there is no such thing. For the past 4 years working in a R&D centre, I have experienced the totally different ratings of our performances simply when my department switched different managers (In the span of 4 years, my department was victimized with the switch of 4 managers). So where is the idea of fair and autonomous assessment? I don’t’ see it coming along over the years. All of us have prophesy that keeps ringing in our head that the bosses evaluation is really about their perception and subjected to nepotism more often than not. It is very unlikely for any employees to go up the career ladder if the managers does not ‘like’ you or even feels uncomfortable with you.

Obviously my company has a well established and efficient performance appraisal system, yet there are loopholes here and there somehow. Unless managers have some kind of strong intuition on how to spot an employee’s talents precisely and reward them accordingly, then it will be good. When HR came up with this idea of talent portal for their employees, transparency is the driving force to ensure a fair appraisal of their employees’ talent to be recognized. It is also meant to be the right platform for the employees to speak their mind to the bosses. However, any system implemented has shortcomings that affect us all in total. Some companies use the performance review session to point out employee’s weaknesses all the time instead of having a constructive session to find a solution to work it out. If a subordinate is not performing well, something is not possibly right. All talk and no action is pointless here.

During my KPI session with my boss, he didn’t not point out the weaknesses but rather told us that we are capable in what we are working on but learning is a process and we can spot on what are we lacking in terms of skills, knowledge etc and find solution to work it out as part of our people development which is more important than fulfilling the KPIs only. Well, it was put in a subtle way but I think it is true if you really give it a second thought. But my friends from other workforces are not so fortunate since their bosses tend to be too opinionated which on the long run it does ruin the confidence of employees on a personal level. Instead of being accountable for success only, the bosses should also be accountable for failures as well.
And the end of the day, performance review is a tool to blame the subordinates for any problems that is happening which I don’t think is fair. Eventually, it makes work lives miserable, the way it leaves employees feeling depressed and anxious. They end up having too little tolerance at home and that’s how family life becomes miserable too.

From my experience, my company has been a leader on leveraging technology to ensure synergy although they are some hitch. They have to make informed decisions and that can be a painstaking task if we can be in their shoes to understand. So both parties, boss-subordinate has to foster the communication and make efforts to reach a win-win situation. Only then the companies can tap talents and out of the box thinkers to reach the goal of the company. A constructive conversation is essential and it's become uncommon in workplaces these days. Only by hearing what the other person thinks, and putting that person's actions in the appropriate context, can you actually see what the person is saying and doing. This will lead to plans where together we can work towards the company’s goal in near future. The ultimatum will be drive towards results but not personality, ways to improve but not disapprove and last but not the least sustainability of the workforce. I believe performance reviews won’t get us anywhere (if the bosses persuade the subordinates to espouse their way of thinking) unless if it leverage on technology to provide more communication and transparency.
Time for new fiscal year performance plan architecture. Helluva work to come and I'm geared up for it!