This is a 3-part post.  I’m going to share why the annual  performance review process needs to go away forever and what should be done instead.  I’ll also share how to do it right and be objective — what a concept!  I hope you enjoy it.

It’s 3 pm on a Thursday afternoon and Andrea goes into her manager’s office for her annual performance review that she’s been dreading it all week.  She knows the drill — her manager will ask her to read the evaluation form he completed and then he’ll finally get around to telling her what she really wants to know — which is how much her raise is.

She leaves frustrated just like every year.  She doesn’t think her manager has any idea of what she’d contributed all year, so how could he have accurately rated it?  Of course she’ll wait another year to discuss her performance – that is unless she screws something up – then she’ll definitely hear about that!

This is happening way too often and it’s creating employees who are disheartened, disengaged, and waiting for the economy to pick up so that they can find other jobs.

Traditional performance reviews – the way most companies do them are broken!  They don’t work and they cause more harm than good.

Here’s why.  In most performance appraisal and review systems,  several things happen…

First, we try to fit the multi-faceted, multi-dimensional, complex human being into a predetermined scoring box on the traditional performance appraisal form – it’s destructive.

Then, we have to take into account that we have imperfect human beings ranking the performance of other imperfect human beings on a piece of paper. What are the chances of that going well?

Then, to top it all off, we tie in the conversation about whether they’re getting a raise or not….

And really…this is and has been a recipe for disaster.

We need to turn this entire experience into a verb — an ongoing action instead of a noun, a project that sits on a shelf and comes out once a year.  If we want employees to get the most of their performance reviews, there has to be an ongoing stream of information zipping back and forth between managers and employees.

So instead of meeting once a year to discuss why Andrea was put in the “Meets Expectations” box after a year of doing her job, we need to burn that form and throw it away forever.  I suggest that we replace this annual nightmare with frequent and brief meetings between manager and employee.  We’ll get to what’s going on in the job and the company so that everyone’s in the know, ideas are shared, issues are tackled and our pal Andrea will actually pay attention instead of waiting until the end to hear about what her raise is going to be.

And I’m not in the minority –

Facebook’s 2,000 employees give regular feedback after meetings, presentations and projects – no scheduling.  It’s 45-second conversation that consists of:  “How did that go?  What could be done better?”

The benefits of moving away from this once a year process are:

1. avoiding surprises with performance issues
2. eliminate pre-evaluation meeting anxiety and fear
3. avoiding inaccuracies on performance issues
4. removing the focus from pay to performance
5. not defining our employees by a performance score number
6. eliminating the sins of recency: that’s when managers only remember what has or hasn’t occurred over the last few months and that’s what they end up putting on the reviews forms
7. providing clarity for what’s expected of our employees and what they can expect from us

This process is easy but it can get screwed up if it’s not done right and do you know how to do that?

Stay tuned for the next post on how to do this right!