Here at Port-to-Port, we just finished that annual ritual known as the Performance Review. It’s a useful exercise that should be done more regularly, but we all try to avoid the things that make us uncomfortable. Performance reviews make everybody uncomfortable, including the reviewer, the stellar performer, and the slacker. Yet we usually come away from them feeling good that we did them. We get some confirmation, and some affirmation, of our perceptions of how we’re doing. On occasion we get a surprise, but most often we get some gentle feedback that nudges us back on course.

In our recent round of reviews, the atmosphere was fairly positive. One question did keep coming up however: "How do I know if I'm doing my job well?" This was a refreshing question for me because it indicates the cultural changes that we began implementing just over a year ago are taking hold and growing roots in Port-to-Port. In the past, our technical staff answered that question for themselves by looking at whether or not they got that computer running. Now, we fully realize that getting the computer running is only the beginning of successfully doing our job. The real proof of us doing our job well is an increase in your ability to do your job well. The answer to our question must come from you, our customer.

In an effort to get more timely feedback about how we're doing our job, we recently added a feature to our internal system that will help with that. Beginning earlier this month, we began sending automated emails to each of you as we begin and complete tasks for you. Some of you have already seen these emails. You might have to approve surveys@pertingo.com in your SpamArrest filters to get them. The rest of you will as you interact with us going forward. The first email is just an acknowledgement that we've gotten your issue and someone is taking responsibility for it. The second email is the more important one. It tells you that we believe we're done working on this task. In that email message, you will get a link that takes you to a page where you can see a summary of what we did for your reference. That summary page also asks you a very important question. We want to know if you agree that the issue is resolved. Sometimes it looks as if things are running OK until the next time you try to run things. Please let us know if we really did get it done.

The second question we ask is the big one. We want that timely feedback. Tell us how we did. Did our action make you more able to get your job done? That's the feedback we need. If you have time, you can also tell us how you'd like for us to get better, or what you want to make sure we don't stop doing. Just put type a few lines in the boxes at the bottom of that page. Trust me. We take this feedback very seriously. Our goal is to serve you better. No one can tell us how to do that better than you.