Staff evaluation thought

Wanna keep this separate from the staff fb thread so here it is! Is this a bad idea?

We should just make a staff performance assessment forum and give every current staff member a thread with a poll with "change your vote" enabled. All current and ex staff can vote on their performance (approve/no strong feeling/disapprove) with justification required to change your vote. If things swing negatively (total inactivity, someone gets banned, makes a terrible decision, etc.), they get warned/demoted. Seems like it would solve a lot of problems?

 

Only current and ex staff would be able to vote, the rationale being that this usergroup is the only one that has experience moderating on Sythe. Ex staff outnumber current staff and have very little skin in the game, which is why I figured them being biased is unlikely. I agree that letting any other users vote seems counterproductive.

Why is it a bad thing that staff with low approval drop off the staff team? That's the whole point.

That's fair, but it does correlate heavily. The nice part about having current and ex staff on the polls is that we'd see both the public activity and private activity reflected in voting.

Staff feedback and evaluation has been a challenge for at least five years. Modscore used to be a big thing when I was new to staff, and thankfully (I hope) that's gone now except for seeing your total count of mod actions taken. I feel like this would do a decent job in getting people to stay active for fear of being given a bad score that would be publicly availalbe.

 

Ex-staff would negatively influence this process as you and I both know we're, by and large, a salty group haha.

What I would suggest is a quarterly community prompted review. Rather than having perpetual review threads waiting for feedback, remove those and release reviews where every quarter, community members can share their input on any number of staff that they would like. This would be taken into account by globals as they hand out reviews of the sectionals and admins as they hand out reviews for the globals.

 

Sounds good to me. I know there’s a fair amount of work done “behind the scenes”, especially by upper staff so it’s hard for anyone outside the system to be an effective judge.

I feel like this would really help to cut back on inactive upper staff - seems like right now there’s no real way for lower/ex-staff to criticize them without feeling like they’re over-stepping.

 

I'm cool with that too but feel like staff has always been hesitant to take community input into account when evaluating performance. But hey, if it works, I'm down.

And re: salty ex staff, I don't mean to suggest a public skewering of people we don't like. I'm not sure how you feel, but generally I feel like most staff are doing well and those who aren't are inactive enough that they shouldn't be surprised that others have noticed their inactivity. Really what I was looking for was something in between current staff and normal users, and ex staff fit the bill better than any other group (and some arbitrary cutoff like "users with x tenure" or "users with x,xxx posts" seems inappropriate here)

That's a benefit too!