Year-end summaries

Worried about preparing a favorable year-end summary, many white-collar workers are approaching ghostwriting agencies, which have mushroomed in recent years, for help. Professional ghostwriters have been running a booming business despite the criticism of the public and the media. But it's time this practice was ended, says an article on gmw.cn. Excerpts:

Year-end summaries are a necessity for individual employees as well as employers. By reviewing your achievements and shortcomings during the year, you can learn valuable lessons on how to enhance your advantages and avoid mistakes to achieve success in the coming years. And setting a goal could be motivating.

But many departments and companies have turned year-end summaries into a tedious exercise, rather a burden, for lower level employees and mid-level managers, who desperately try to cope with the demands and are forced to look for ghostwriters.

Some companies have even linked the quality of year-end summaries to the annual assessments of employees, prompting them to believe that writing fancy summaries take precedence over hard work. That has made some employees resort to trickery; they assess colleagues' achievements and try to trump them and impress their superiors with better-written summaries.

Therefore, managers and employers who assign unreasonable tasks for year-end summaries are the reason why employees seek the help of ghostwriters. Managers assigned by companies to oversee the process should judge a year-end summary on its objectivity, genuineness and effectiveness rather than its language and length.

Only if a summary is objective can employees and employers both learn how to avoid mistakes and chart a successful future.

(China Daily 12/26/2013 page9)