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Q. You want to abolish annual performance reviews, but what would you replace them with?
A. We are so used to things being the way they are that we ask questions like, “What would you replace annual performance reviews with?” instead of, “What problem do annual performance reviews solve?”
Annual performance reviews are a solution in search of a problem.
Employees do not need them to know “how they are doing.” You can tell them at any point how they are doing. They do not need a letter grade.
Employees do not need them to know “how they are doing.” You can tell them at any point how they are doing. They do not need a letter grade.
We do not need performance reviews to calculate pay increases. That is a time-honored lie. Managers typically know how much they want to give you out of their pay increase pool before they calculate the performance review to match the pay decision they’ve already made.
We can pay people based on the market rate for their job. That would also minimize salary compression, one of the most significant causes of employee disaffection and turnover.
We do not need performance reviews to document performance problems. Literally every time a manager has come to me wanting to terminate someone, I pulled up their last performance review and it was average, or better.
We can plan with employees. We can brainstorm. We do not need to treat employees like children, sitting in judgment on them while reviewing their progress over the past year.
I have been married for more than two decades and my husband has yet to give me a performance review, a good thing because I would tell him where to stuff it and walk out the door. He would do the same thing to me.
We do not give performance reviews to people we view as equals.
When an organizational process or system takes massive numbers of person/hours and no one ever asks for or puts forward a business case to justify its existence, then we know it is one of the pillars of the fear-based management system we all know so well
