“Time for your performance review.”
If that’s a phrase you dread hearing, you’re definitely not alone. Various studies show that anywhere from 60-90% of people hate performance reviews. Although reviews originally started as a strategy to help employees improve and to build better companies, the process has, in many cases, grown to be a routine chore that is often stressful, unhelpful and sometimes even harmful.
But all hope is not lost. The performance review can be saved — but it requires some major shifts in thinking and planning. Performance reviews can be a powerful tool for encouraging employee growth and engagement, fostering a supportive company culture and improving the bottom line. Below, we’ll look at some of the major issues with performance reviews and how we can all work to reform them for better.
The problem: It’s easy to write off a manager’s feedback as opinion.
Top-down reviews by themselves are rarely productive. If the manager and direct report don’t work together closely, it’s easy for the employee to write off a worse-than-expected review from a seemingly disconnected boss who doesn’t appear to understand their day-to-day responsibilities. If the two aren’t working side by side, feedback may be overly vague and lack the specifics needed for improvement. On the other end of the spectrum, handing out inflated reviews can cause stagnation and foster favoritism.
The solution: Reviews should be 360 degrees.
One review from one manager doesn’t really paint a full picture of an employee’s holistic performance. The review process should involve the peers they work with every day and at least one direct report, when applicable. If the employee has been on a special project or collaborating across departments, ask for feedback from the leaders of those projects as well. Your employee is often so much more than their job description, so look to paint the whole picture.
The problem: Reviews are too infrequent.
Ironically, one of the reasons we dread performance reviews is because they only happen once a year. Modern business moves fast, and a lot can happen in 12 months. Most of us probably don’t remember what we had for breakfast last week — should we really look to analyze a year’s worth of performance in one session? Projects end, goals realign, and team structure changes. Most importantly, an employee may have changed their own personal goals and growth plan drastically over the course of a year, and managers should have regular visibility into those shifts.
The solution: Have ongoing conversations.
Consider moving from yearly or six-month reviews to quarterly reviews, plus regular check-ins. Most big businesses are moving away from this old model already. Before making the change at your company, put a specific plan in place. Meetings can be less formal but should still have a clear framework, including benchmarks and opportunities for setting goals. The focus should also shift from year-over-year progress to continuous personal growth, setting the cultural precedent that employees are rewarded for growing and learning, not just annually.
The problem: Subjective reviews are vulnerable to bias.
This is one of the biggest challenges we face in HR. We all carry unconscious biases. Idiosyncratic Rater Effect shows us ratings of others give more insight on the person doing the rating than the subject. Recency bias skews ratings toward the present and omits earlier work that reviewers may not remember (though more frequent reviews help with this — see above). Women receive critical feedback, often subjective comments about their personality, at a 30% higher rate than their male peers. As the sheer volume of employee reviews and data increases, reviewers become decision-fatigued and even more vulnerable to bias.
The solution: Focus on eliminating biases.
Biases are sneaky. Often, they only become obvious when everyone knows what to look for, so education and training for managers is always the first step. Ensure that feedback stays objective. Options such as “extremely satisfactory” or “good” should be rewritten with more specificity, e.g. “I trust the employee’s work” or “employee has missed two to three deadlines in the past three months.” Clearly define goals and objectives and ensure they align with the business. Has the employee secured the number of leads indicated for this quarter? With regular check-ins, managers and reports should be able to have a much better — that is, more objective — view of an employee’s progress.
Advanced HR tools can also help reduce bias by making managers more aware of it. Artificial intelligence can flag overly subjective and biased words that employees are including in reviews, prompting them to rethink their word choice and real meaning. Reviews shouldn’t happen in a vacuum, so lean on your tech tools for assistance. Software doesn’t forget as easily, and tracking objective goals in smart, reliable HR software can be a huge help in avoiding bias.
When done right, performance reviews can be one of the best ways to keep employees growing, engaged and aligned with your company’s direction. If managers and employees take a collaborative, growth mindset toward performance reviews, these once-dreaded processes can be become game-changing wins. Reviews can strengthen the employee-manager connection and help to create and reinforce a culture where employees want to improve themselves, those around them and the business at large. And maybe someday, we can learn to truly love performance reviews.
