Now live 🥳 Our Performance Review Alternative + Guide to Rethinking Performance Reviews

If you’ve never been a fan of performance reviews, our tool + guide are for you.

Reviews are for books, movies, and restaurants.

Reviews are not for people.

The concept of “performance reviews” has always felt odd to you, as a result.

As a leader, you want your team to continually level-up and improve — but a “performance review” doesn’t accomplish that. In fact, research has found that traditional performance reviews make performance worse one-third of the time.

This is for 4 reasons:

#1: “I don’t want to say anything bad.” We fear what we write in our performance reviews might negatively affect ourselves — or someone else. We keep our feedback surface-level and vague, rather than meaningful and specific.

#2: “I’ll wait to bring this up at the next review cycle.” We sit on feedback until the performance review cycle happens, enabling feedback to inevitably build up. We surprise our team if and when it does come out in the end — and not in a good way.

#3: “I have to triangulate and summarize 3+ people’s perspectives.” Performance reviews are not a direct, frank conversation. They are a telephone game of “he said she said,” leaving us confused on what exactly they need to improve. Rarely do performance reviews feel fair or accurate.

#4: “Sheesh, this takes forever.”The average manager reported spending about 210 hours on writing performance reviews. 210 hours to describe how project communications could’ve been better, 210 hours to describe how project outcomes could’ve been better… That’s longer than some projects take, themselves!

You’re ready for a better way…

And it’s (finally) here!

After spending 2 years studying research from the past 20+ years on performance reviews and collecting our own independent research from 1,000+ managers and employees, we’ve distilled it all into a methodology and a tool for a performance review alternative.

You can check out both below…

💡 First, read our Guide to Rethinking Performance Reviews.
8 chapters based on research on what works — and doesn’t — with performance reviews and a better path forward. We cover the complex history of performance reviews that lead us to where we are today, the aspects of performance reviews that are worth keeping, and what we need to overhaul.

Please feel free to share this guide with your leadership team members, fellow colleagues, and peers at other organizations who are eager to learn if there’s a better alternative to performance reviews.

⚡️ Then, put it all into practice with our Performance Review Alternative — our new tool in Know Your Team that gives you the structure and guidance to create a real culture of feedback and continuous improvement in your team. If you’re never been a fan of performance reviews — especially if you’re an organization with less than 300 people — this tool is for you.

💫 Ready to see our alternative in action? Schedule a demo with us.
Get a personalized tour of our Performance Feedback tool, our alternative to performance reviews with our KYT team. We’ll give best practices on how to implement our methodology, as well.

We’re so excited to hear what you think. We’ve had this in the works for a while, and so appreciate your patience (we were a few days behind our promised January launch date!). It’s been a labor of love 😀

Can’t wait to hear your thoughts.

P.S. If you find the guide useful, we’d so appreciate a show of kind support on Product Hunt ❤️ This helps us spread the word on rethinking performance reviews for other folks, far ‘n wide. Big thank you, in advance 🙏