「Core Tips」
The defense is the key link for many Internet companies to judge the positive and performance promotion, some people have balded their heads for the PPT, and some people have worn out their mouths for the speech. In this defense game, there are performances everywhere, wrestling everywhere. Some of the gameplay is in the defense field, and more rules are outside the court.
Author | Chen Yangyuan
Edited by | Xing Yun
A discovery that makes people instantly nervous. All the meeting rooms throughout the company from Wednesday to next Friday were fully booked, and the people who booked were all HR.
Some employees quickly reminded on social platforms: "April layoffs are coming, everyone should be mentally prepared." A stone stirs up a thousand layers of waves. HR rushed to the real-name comment in a panic: Please communicate with HR more questions to reduce unnecessary misunderstandings - it turns out that the conference room was full because of the promotion defense arranged.
This is the "oolong incident" that occurred in Meituan Dianping in April 2019, and the sensitive nerves of the employees of the big factory knocked out the relatively low-key but influential defense link in the Internet company. In the conference rooms of Internet companies, the smoothness of many employees' regularization and promotion must be related to the documents, PPTs, speeches, Q&A, etc. they display.
The defense is a key step for Internet employees to "leap the dragon gate".
"In the conference room, there sat my +1, +2, my HR, and two or three other department leaders." Lin Ke still remembers the scene where she pushed open the door of the conference room, brushed and looked at five or six pairs of eyes, and the screen projected a few pages of documents that she had finally formed after adjusting data, ideas, and polishing words countless times after work for nearly a month.
Taking a deep breath, she still couldn't restrain her nervousness.
But the defence has already begun.
1. The defense begins...
The time of the defence was 1:30 p.m. In order to talk about this document, at noon that day, Lin Ke did not eat lunch, but rushed to the work area where the defense conference room was located at eleven o'clock in the morning, found a corner where no one was, sorted out the manuscript over and over again, and then told himself again and again, until one o'clock, and entered the conference room.
The 1-2 to 2-1 promotion defense she participated in only needed to provide documentation, not PPT. ByteDance, where Lin ke works, has two performance evaluations and promotion opportunities a year, and only those who have been nominated can participate.
In March this year, Byte's new round of performance evaluation kicked off as scheduled.
The defense document has a fixed template, divided into three parts: the work you have done, what problems you feel you still have, and your plans for the future. After the presentation, it is also necessary to answer the questions of the judges, and the on-site performance will also affect the outcome of the defense.
In Internet companies, the key nodes in employees' career development are usually accompanied by the form of defense, such as regularization, performance evaluation, promotion, and debriefing to management levels, although the name and form are different, but it is essentially an assessment of employees.
The regularization defense is for new employees, most of them only HR and business-related colleagues or leaders participate, Lin Ke's regularization defense only took ten minutes, read the prepared documents to a superior and HR, and before the defense began, she had received the news of the success of the conversion.
Promotion defense is often more tense, because often linked to performance, related to salary increases or year-end bonuses, but also involved in the career development prospects of Internet people, competition and elimination are more intense, large factory employees often from this step began to "roll up", prepare 10 versions of promotion materials, spend several months to do a PPT, are the Internet people face the promotion defense in the normal.
Li Xing's promotion defense lasted for an hour, and after speaking PPT, each of the six judges would ask questions, and various business and technical questions were constantly thrown at him, and he was nervous while answering.
Different companies, different levels, different types of work and even different departments may differ in the form of presentation, jury composition and judgment methods of the defense, and the difficulty and low-level promotion of defense in many Internet companies are also different.
For example, recently Baidu employees said on the social platform that in the product operation sequence, there is no need for a defense for the promotion of the department's 4-5 level, and it is recommended by the superior after directly uploading the PPT, and the 5-6 level defense not only needs to be defended on the spot, but also may organize a pre-rehearsal defense. The low-level promotion of byte R&D positions only requires document display, and high-level promotions generally prepare PPT.
The higher you go, the more difficult it is to pass the defense.
For the PPT template to open members, under the data package, and even online lectures are the norm of Internet people, searching the stomach, using a variety of contacts to ask the PPT gods around them to transform their mediocre work performance into cool data, charts, but also the "strong volume moment" in everyone's work.
Compared with the real ability and performance behind it, more people will focus on the viewing of self-packaging and display, social platforms, and even employees are anxious to rescue: "Urgent, how to treat stuttering, usually fine, once you arrive at the meeting, the speech will not work, especially the flat tongue tone, just like Song Xiaofeng of rural love, recently to be promoted to defense, but the whole ah." ”
While the eight immortals across the sea are preparing for the defense, Internet people are not sure how much their defense process can affect the promotion result. Li Xing feels that the impact of PPT and the ability to answer questions on the results of the defense may be four or six, but the impact of the defense on the results of promotion is a new problem.
On the pulse, someone asked what percentage of the success rate of the us group L7 was promoted to L8, the performance, the support of the boss, and the success rate of the PPT defense. The comment that received the most responses was: "Personally feel 3:3:4, the scene is still quite important, if the scene generally depends on the performance and boss support." ”
In other words, the defense scene is important, but many times, the rules of the game of promotion are not all in the defense field.
2. "Results packaging", internal wrestling
Du Yue is a marketing department employee of an Internet factory, usually excellent performance, in the company's system of assessment for two consecutive quarters of excellence, the most important level of promotion, he bumped into the defense interview. Like many big companies such as Tencent, the company's defense interview design is to randomly draw interviewers from other departments to reflect fairness.
However, Du Yue drew a department head who had more "friction" with the usual work of his department, and he felt that he was fluent in the defense, but he could not escape the result of the promotion failure. During the year, 6 people in their department participated in the promotion, and only one passed, and the pass rate was at the bottom of the company. At the same time, their department got the company's annual excellent department of the year, and two key employees contributed well to the department, but they lost in the promotion and chose to leave the company.
The end result is that the HR responsible for their department has been "killed", the rules for promotion have been adjusted, and the promotion assessment of the marketing department and several other functional departments has been interviewed by the personnel of the department.
One problem is that the defence is increasingly acting like a vehicle for the parties to wrestle.
Wang Xin works in a large mobile phone factory, every quarter, at the end of the year, the company must carry out the employees' debriefing defense, and the ordinary employees' debriefing defense is judged by the department leaders and all the team members in the department. He clearly remembers the absurdity he felt when he first audited the debriefing defense, and his colleagues used various data and legends on a page of PPT to show a very powerful looking achievement, which immediately frightened him, but without listening to two sentences, he realized that this was actually a very small and extremely basic thing in their business.
At this time, he joined the company for only two months, Wang Xin sighed that he could see through the things at a glance, and all the team members and leaders who served as judges on the stage must be more aware of the exaggerations in this PPT.
But everyone acquiesced, and even agreed with, this "package of results" in the debriefing defense.
Because what follows is the year-end debriefing competition between departments. In less than November, Wang Xin's boss was pulled to a meeting every day by the big leader to discuss how to write the boss's year-end PPT and what results the people on the front line of the department had achieved. "Our +3 manages 2 departments, and he will assign his debriefing tasks to the next level in the two departments, one part of each department, and merge them into his debriefing report. His subordinates continued to divide the task. ”
Wang Xin felt helpless about the internal friction in this process, when the boss asked his subordinates to complete the debriefing report on Friday, the deadline given by the subordinate to the subordinate would become Thursday, and the subordinate would adjust the timeline downward to Wednesday, and the lower subordinate would "roll" down layer by layer.
Almost all the basic employees are willing to contribute various "packaging solutions" to the boss's debriefing report, because this determines the department's year-end award. The "packaging masters" cultivated by the defense in the department can often shine at this time, making the boss's debriefing report more competitive in the department competition.
Even in the low-level promotion defense that Lin Ke participated in, "packaging" was a necessary job.
Before the formal defense, Lin Ke has done several defense drills for her +1, +1 will tell her the revision of the defense document, remind her who the defense jury is composed of, in the areas that the judges do not understand can find "packaging" space, the data should be more impactful, the shortcomings of self-analysis should be found to have an impact on the business, and can be corrected and solved, even the question session after the defense speech, +1 has listed an outline for Lin Ke: These are the questions I may ask you on the spot.
"Many times, the defense is not a one-person defense. The success rate of the subordinate defense is related to the attention and leadership of the superior, and the content of the basic employee's defense is related to the work results of the department. Wang Xin said. Under the binding and wrestling of layers of interests, the so-called truth in the defense has mostly been cloaked in artificial magnificence.
3. Will the competition for promotion intensify this year?
Browsing the news about the defense on the workplace social platform, most of the Internet people are not sure about the value of the defense. "Complicating simple things" is the common evaluation of the defense by many employees. However, some people believe that taking the opportunity to sort out their past work is also a self-improvement.
Despite the success of the promotion, Li Xing still had a hard time liking the form of the defense, but he couldn't think of a better alternative to the defense.
Behind the form of the defense, the essence is the management problem of the Internet company, when the scale of employees continues to expand and the business grows rapidly, the Internet company needs a set of processable grade evaluation mechanism.
An Internet employee told Leopard Change that in his impression, his company had not established a formal defense system five or six years ago, and the Leader directly wrote a comment and submitted for promotion. At that time, the number of employees was not much, the Leader was very clear about everyone's ability and business situation, after the rapid expansion of the company, the number of external recruitment increased, in order to prevent deviations in the interview, it was necessary to re-verify through the defense of the regularization and promotion links, and strengthen management.
Liu Ke experienced the promotion defense from teacher to management position at an online education company, and clearly felt that the manager understood the intentions of employees in the defense. Online education companies list employees as two major sections of teacher line and management line, and employees who have successfully promoted management can be in the teacher line and management line at the same time, and receive two salaries for teaching and management.
Most employees enter the company through the teacher line, and every year the staff drawn from the teacher line to enter the management line must go through a complex process.
Management first selects teachers with excellent professional ability to interview to determine whether they have the willingness to manage, and the willing teachers then fill in the promotion materials for review by manpower and superiors, and the teachers who pass the review conduct a psychological assessment of whether they are suitable as leaders, and then there is a leaderless group interview, a personal interview, and a training session that lasts for several months.
Only employees who have passed all of the above processes are considered to have their management capabilities verified. However, not all qualified teachers can be promoted to the management line, they may not be able to set specific management posts due to the fierce competition for management positions in their own business groups, as a reserve of managers with management ability, they are still in the teacher line and have no management salary.
"The success rate of the promotion defense is, in the final analysis, matching the company's development needs." Liu can verify this in the "double subtraction" of online education a few months later. After the "double reduction", Liu Ke's subject group was directly reduced from more than a hundred teachers at the highest time to more than thirty people, and the management posts were almost all laid off, Liu Ke could only return to the teacher line, only taking the teaching salary, and the company's management line promotion and defense were also completely stopped.
The same law can also be followed in all aspects of the promotion of Internet manufacturers.
With news such as layoffs, business contraction, and the slowdown in spring recruitment, some Internet people are pessimistic about the prospects for promotion this year, and high-level promotions may be more difficult than in previous years. A large factory employee said that the Internet industry environment is slowing down, in previous years there are more blank business, the growth rate of the entire company and the industry is also fast, can make more results, and this year's Internet can make good, eye-catching achievements of the business is less and less, low-level promotion to the basic work in business development may still be able to maintain a normal state, but the space for high-level promotion may be affected.
For most people, individuals and projects, departments, companies and even the industry environment are growing together, and the best path to promotion is to go on a clipper. Therefore, whenever the performance and promotion are evaluated, the big factory often has a wave of internal or outward personnel flow, and the defense of performance and promotion is also used as the basis for employees to re-evaluate the business of the department and the development of the company.
Employees who want to rise to the high level can get fewer opportunities in the department where the business is slowing down and stagnating, and they will strive to flow to a department with faster development, and the new business with rapid development and strong certainty is most favored by the employees of large factories, and the new business with great uncertainty, even if the investment is huge, the Internet people have to go through some inquiry, repeated consideration, and finally vote with their feet.
This also means that for Internet employees, the other side of the defense is actually "discernment". In Internet companies, more often than not, screws have to rush to find a suitable position, tying themselves to the big ship of projects, companies and even industry development.