Performance Reviews: Why Everyone Hates Them and What You Can Do
Do you love conducting performance reviews or being reviewed by your manager? Odds are you don’t because performance reviews are one of the most loathed tasks of many managers, carried out more to appease HR than to be useful to the employees being reviewed.
Periodically, there’s speculation that we should give up performance reviews because they’re time-consuming (taking up to three hours per employee), involve too much paperwork, and kill morale. Studies suggest most performance reviews don’t lead to real change or improvement anyway.
Some views are even stronger, such as that a performance review is a “one-side-accountable, boss-administered review.” The alleged purpose is to enlighten subordinates about what they should be doing better or differently, while the real purpose is “intimidation aimed at preserving the boss's authority and power advantage.”
Still, most companies continue to use annual appraisals. So if you have to conduct them (or might someday), here are a few suggestions. When review time approaches, don’t rely on your memory of how each employee performed. Instead, create and maintain a log for each employee. Despite the time it takes, prepare for the review, keeping in mind the key messages you want to convey and the feeling you’d like the employee to leave the meeting with. Give credit where it’s due and encourage candid discussion, even while raising issues of concern that need attention.
If you’d like the employee to make adjustments to his or her performance or behavior, don’t just demand a change. Instead, make it meaningful by describing why you want the change and how it will affect others on the team or in the organization. Help the employee come up with practical, specific ways to implement the change and set short-term goals over a fixed time period, such as thirty to sixty days, so you and the employee can monitor progress and make adjustments if needed.
An especially important piece of advice is don’t close the review until you and the employee are in agreement about each aspect of the review.
You could consider trying an altogether new approach. For example, record such information for each employee as three to five key achievements, three to five personal characteristics you admire, and three to five of the biggest contributions the person could make. Then use this information as the basis for a conversation with the employee. This format isn't limited to annual reviews; it can be used after an assignment, before a change in role, or at some periodic interval, such as quarterly.
Even if your HR department prefers not to adopt a new approach to performance reviews, you may find this approach valuable for interim reviews.
Whether or not you have to (or want to) continue conducting performance reviews, it seems worthwhile to hold conversations and give employees feedback on a regular basis in addition to the annual reviews.
