Bonus Time Soon

Yea, it's been a long time since I last blogged. I guess the novelty is wearing a little bit. And well, it's starting to dawn on me that I am writing this blog for myself, to remind myself!

Anyway, it has been an interesting monthly, yet again. I did all the performance reviews and even submitted the performance bonus allocation. Was revised by management and we have since re-submitted our final allocation, which I hoped will be accepted. Year 2007 was a good year, the best that I've seen so far in my 8 years at Phillip. Yea. That's 8 years in 2nd May 2008. While rewarding based on performance is key, years of service did have some good weighing in. I doubt it's a matter of years of service. I believe it's more of a "cut off". That's why we believe that a 2 year period is a bare minimum. 1 year for learning and 1 year to start producing, I'd say.

Anyway, 2008 does not look good. You ask me and I'll tell you that indeed we are in for a recession cycle. Maybe it'll take another 3-5 years before we see any boom of the 2007 magnitude.

Anyway. My own performance review was done over 3 hours or so, from a scheduled 30minunes. I mean, frankly speaking, I doubt that 30minutes is sufficient, especially in the early years when someone just joined a certain position. More is required. So, it went ok. There were some debates and I kind of concluded this: the bad can be seen but the good is taken for granted. Well, at least that's how I felt. And I was telling myself this is probably not something I'd like to subject my own staff.

The feedback portion was great though. I am just hoping that the discussion was more geared towards 2008 because if that's for 2007, it pretty much means that I did not meet quite a number of objectives. If you have access to my personal story, then you'd know how it was in that first year in the department. I think I did a good job, given the circumstances. But as I mentioned during the review, let's forget about 2007 and set it as a base and look forward to 2008.

Well, we'll say how much the bonus is!

Other than that, all's well. My darling is getting used to lecturing at SP, though as usual, there will always be kids who are kids and act like so! She's taking a night class and that's on a tough Monday night. Guess it's worth the effort!

I lost the family camera, a SGD600 Panasonic. I felt so bad and numb at the same time. Did not realise that I lost it for 4 days. I probably left it in a cab.

I am getting my 2 new staff and a NTU student (on attachment) and I'll be full house. I have great plans for the team and I really believe we can achieve much during this time, given the slow down too. At the simplest, my goal is to be able to leave at 6:30pm while enjoying good bonuses. At staff level, my goal is to produce managers or project specialists or operations specialist who are good at execution. I am proud of my current team. Now I'm awaiting to see who can go the next level but flying on their own in a different department.

Half of 2008 is always gone and that does not leave much time to do all things that we want to do. Nevertheless, there is progress and that is important.