There are some who say that performance reviews should be canceled altogether.  We say they should be overhauled, rebranded, and made to actually work.

Performance evaluation and monitoring should be happening all the time, but let's be honest.  Without a scheduled time on the calendar, sometimes these conversations get pushed down the priority list.  Does that make someone a bad manager?  Probably not.  It just makes them busy.

So let's take a practical look at where we are today.  In the next post, we'll talk about how to revive the review process.

The Traditional Review Process Doesn't Work

People hate performance reviews.  And honestly, they have a reason to.  The process doesn't work for a number of reasons:

1. There's too much work for managers.  Completing comprehensive evaluations on all employees within a span of a couple of weeks is daunting, repetitive, and massively time-consuming.  "Soul-deadening" is an adjective that comes to mind.  By the 5th review, most managers have stopped putting their most thoughtful responses down and are simply focusing on getting them all done by the deadline. 
    
2. No one can remember details from 6 months ago.  No, really.  There's research on this.  We don't remember very well what happens in the middle of a series of events.  The beginning and end, yes, but the middle, not so much.  With performance review cycles, there's usually not a clearly-defined "beginning" that is markedly different than any other day of the week.  That leaves us remembering only the end.  A review that covers 12 months but really only pulls data from the last 5 weeks isn't fair, just, or useful.
    
3. Employees receive feedback out of context.  To encourage good behaviors and develop positive traits, managers need to give consistent feedback when they see a behavior occurring, not 3 months from then.  This creates an association in the employee's mind around the behavior and helps them process the feedback appropriately.  Referencing behavior from a meeting/presentation/company dinner from several months ago may elicit this response: "What meeting/presentation/company dinner?"  How likely is the feedback to stick when the employee can't even remember the event you're talking about? In the event that they do remember the event, their immediate response will be, "Why are you bringing this up now?"
    
4. Employees get an unfair amount of feedback all at once.  Waiting to share feedback with an employee until the end of the year means that they are overwhelmed with both the things they do well and what they do poorly.  The majority of this feedback will go right out the other ear, with only a little of it sticking.  That means that all the painstaking time invested by managers was mostly useless.  Good to know, huh?

But wait!  There is hope!  In the next post, we'll dig into what we can do to change the process and make it actually work.