Death to Performance Reviews - Again
Richard A. Moran
Venture partner, author, speaker, advisor, radio personality. Lending perspective, prescriptions and personality to the workplace.
The death of performance reviews may be highly exaggerated. When big organizations like Accenture proclaimed the elimination of performance reviews in that organization, a collective sigh of relief could be heard around the world. Yay! We thought there would be no more of the charade of managers trying to guess what we really contributed to the organization. No more stress, we thought, about the entire review process and whether or not we would be placed on double secret probation. The elimination of the review process was, we thought, the beginning of a sea change in employee engagement.
Alas, it was not to be. Like the game of Whac-a-Mole, performance reviews continue to pop up in some organizations. In other organizations, they never went away.
HR professionals roll their eyes at the thought of eliminating reviews. Reviews can protect the organization from litigation. Yet, most HR people I know dread the entire process. Butthead managers still hold onto reviews as a way to fire people and keep them worried about job security. Analysts who understand bell curves continue to work on spreadsheets to determine who is contributing and who is not. But cutting annual performance reviews out of the organizational psyche continues to make a ton of sense. It makes business sense and, why do something year after year that everyone hates?
The business case for killing performance reviews requires only back of the envelope analysis. It is called simple arithmetic. Take people’s salaries and come up with an hourly rate. Then, multiply the number of hours that the organization spends on the review process. The answer will be a reason to kill the process. In many organizations, the time devoted to performance reviews shuts down the plant. Nothing happens while people wait to be evaluated at the expense of customers and others.
What is maybe more important than the business case is the logic and emotion associated with the review. Why continue a practice that no one likes, is seen as an annual ritual of pain, and may or may not be effective? A culture that continues to do things that no one wants to do is a culture that needs to ask hard questions like, “Why are we doing this?” If the answer is truthful the culture can change. The annual review is a prime target.
This is not to say that feedback is not a good thing. We should all look for some sort of feedback every day. The best source of feedback is our own inner self. People generally know how they perform and what should be improved. Feedback is still critically important.
We should ask others for feedback too, but that doesn’t have to be in a formal review situation. The best feedback is usually in the hallway after a presentation or in the car on the way home from a sales call or after a meeting. Listen to that feedback and add your own inner analysis and you will be a better performer.
No matter the case, I know performance reviews are not dead. In most organizations they are very much alive and well so I have a suggestion. Instead of a painful process, every one should complete a 3x5 card with one question on it: How did you make this place better? Explain:
The answers might be a pleasant surprise to everyone.
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Richard is the author of the new book The Thing About Work: Showing Up and Other Important Matters [A Worker’s Manual]. You can follow his writing on Twitter, Facebook, or at his website at richardmoran.com.
Richard is a noted San Francisco based business leader, workplace pundit, bestselling author and venture capitalist.
I am blessed
6 年I cannot agree with this as a performance review allows you and the employee to engage in a detailed analysis of performance and yes the way to do it is to set an appointment with the employee and ask them to come in with evidence that they have contributed to the department's success an.This also gives you the person doing the review an opportunity to point out areas that can be developed.Once ayear is to long for any one to wait for for feedback so as often as you can have that engagement with the staff member and it should not always be negative. As leaders we are there to build the employee
HR Data and Systems
6 年I'm not sure I totally agree. I think we've all come to think of anything which comes under the heading of 'performance review' as being the exact same bureaucratic, structured, formalise, face-to-face, interrogation process that thought leaders have got us fearing so much - this simply isn't the case! You allude to the fact that feedback is necessary and it doesn't matter if it is happening in the hallway after a meeting, informally, in the car, over the phone, or in any other format, it will still take up time and it's still a form of performance review. I believe that rather than chasing our tails trying to eradicate performance reviews while retaining them by another name, we should be working to make feedback processes more relevant, effective, and flexible, as well as training managers to do this well. Thank you for this post Richard, I enjoyed reading it and love your to-the-point style of writing!
Designer | Human-AI interaction @ Tomoro
6 年My favourite line... "Butthead managers still hold onto reviews as a way to fire people and keep them worried about job security." But, I might add into that "and cover their own ass"
Senior Banking Professional /30 years expertise in 3 Banks both Conv & New Gen/Top Performer/All Star Linked in ranking
6 年Thought provoking write up ! There is no death to performance appraisal system as such, as far as many Organisations are still conducting it , value based, with sincerity & a sense of purpose , aiming at improvisation of both the employee and the employer, as an effective mutually beneficial practice .It matters well only where " people first and profits next " motive reigns the show. Equally true that it is already in a dead mode, in those Weak Organisations, which go on conducting it , as a routine drama, just as a farce or an eye wash, where nothing productive turns up on either side. To many Organisations , this has become a dangerous tool to eliminate & demoralise work force, unquestionably, whom they want to expel also, with no genuine reason .Thanks to so many other service sectors where neither promotion nor pay hike/ annual increments are dependent on rigorous " performance appraisal " but just seniority if you ' ve already fulfilled the eligibility criteria at the time of joining as in the case of Teaching & Non Teaching staff of Schools and Colleges /Collegiate education especially. Worth sharing..
Vice President - Program Manager at Airbus Defence and Space
6 年Appreciate the article as my experience is that todays done performance reviews are nothing else than a bureacratic "over processed" HR disengaging no adding value toolset. If someone takes himself as a serious leader, he/she knows how to work with peolpe in order to get the best results together achieved and how passionate committed, empowered and loyal teams members can reach for top customer satisfaction. It is comparable to a football trainer: Set the different players to their right position, having inspired them with feedback between the games and what to go for and let them play to win.