Oh Performance Reviews, how I detest thee.
I spent most of my day reading performance reviews and by noon I suffered from mushy brain.
It’s been my experience that performance reviews only wreak havoc; managers hate them, employees don’t care for them and get stressed out. Before I joined the cult that is HR, I didn’t care for performance review time.
My general theory is annual performance reviews should be outlawed. Staff should be coached and managed on a regular basis. I’ve preached the no surprises bit to managers for years but I still feel like I’m talking to a brick wall.
What are your thoughts on performance reviews? Hate them or love them?
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
My beef with performance reviews is that they are backwards looking. Let’s not rehash the past, let’s live in the now and work for the future.
This backward effect also messes things up in regards to compensation. We wind up basing peoples pay on what they did last year vs. what we expect of them this year.
Performance reviews are a vital part of any performance management system. However, without an actual performance management system they may be more trouble than they are worth.
But seriously, why is it ok to be bad at this?
Oh, performance reviews! Aside from the classic “seat at the table” discussion, nothing gets a HR pro going like them.
I agree that the process is flawed-so what are we doing to fix it? I think that forward thinking business leaders need to answer that question if they want to get the best out of their employees.
Ultimately I think it comes down to time and empathy. Supervisors need to take the time to do reviews and to do them right. By empathy I mean caring about the person (being reviewed) enough to do it right.
In my first job, I worked in a system where you got an A, B, C or D. I graduated college with a 3.2, so when my first review earned me a C+, I was very upset. I was told that A was reserved for someone who walks on water, and I couldn’t possible be a B in my first year.
Now, 30 some years later, that was one of my better reviews in terms of helping me learn what I need to know to perform better.
I’ve had great bosses with little in the way of performance review, and I’ve had meticulous reviewers who were not very good bosses. The system works when the culture is clear and their are specific consequences for performance. Having a review document and a schedule is only worth something if you have good management to back it up.
In setting up a succession planning and talent management system at a previous company, I did a lot of 1:1 interviews with front line employees. One of their biggest complaints was their annual reviews. Feedback too late to make changes, development needs too vague to show actionable results, and too few training options for development. So I suggested that they “take charge of their development” and be more proactive with their managers. I also warned the managers that this might be coming…
The process was pretty Darwinian — the high-performers we’d identified tended to run with the advice, others not so much. And the people who did run with it and set up monthly/quarterly review meetings with their managers, proactively dust of and track their goals, look for alternative ways of getting their development needs met, they tended to get *better* ratings the next year — better than peers, or at least better than they got before. And anecdotally, HR felt that the reviews themselves were better, easier to read and follow, and actually had some context to them.
Which is all a long-winded way of saying performance management should belong to the performer — if HR or the manager owns it, it’s a chore.
@Puf That’s why I’m a fan of ongoing one on one coaching rather than this once a year crap. Regardless of how we preach they reviews are 12 month look back, many managers base their comments/scores on what has happened recently, at least in my experience.
@George It shouldn’t be ok to be bad at performance reviews. If my manager has taken the time to work with me in mapping out a plan for my growth, my performance should be easily gauged. We should be meeting reguarly to discuss issues, things I’ve done well, things I need to work on etc. I’m not a fan of the yearly performance reviews, I think they cause more problems than they solve.
Thanks for stopping by, I got up on my soapbox a little there; seems to be a trend this week