5 Reasons to Stop Giving Reviews and Start Managing People

Writing and delivering annual performance reviews takes up a lot of time and does not always deliver the kind of actionable feedback that will help employees grow. Plus, it is stressful and challenging for both managers and employees. Consider these five reasons to stop giving annual reviews, and adopt continual performance management system instead:

• Performance reviews are demotivating
• In traditional reviews managers usually give the year’s feedback at once, which is hard for managers to deliver, and hard for employees to hear. Instead, feedback should be delivered throughout the year so employees can receive recognition and coaching in real time. Come review time, there are no surprises and the conversation can look forward instead of looking back.
• Performance reviews don’t promote positive relationships
• If the goal of performance reviews is to encourage better performance from employees, then managing people should be a continuous process, not an annual one. Traditional reviews encourage managers to find something to fix when they really should be focusing on how employees can continually develop and add value to the team and organization.
• Performance reviews aren’t useful
• Reviews are actually hard work, which would be fine if they were also useful. But what usually happens is managers spend a lot of time gathering a lot of information on employees, and that information goes nowhere. Instead, performance reviews should provide information that helps organizations understand employee growth and team contribution.
• Performance reviews ignore team dynamics
• Managers are responsible for managing individuals and teams, but traditional performance reviews focus only on individuals. Instead, reviews should help managers analyze and provide feedback on everything that impacts team performance including how people work together, and the individual contributions that fall outside job descriptions or set objectives.
• Performance reviews don’t tell the whole story
• Traditional reviews remove the context you need to interpret performance. They summarize and compress information when you need to understand details, subtlety, complexity and interactions to identify growth opportunities. In addition, the review process tends to normalize performance under a bell curve, ignoring the fact that things change over time.

Performance reviews may not be going away anytime soon. However, they can better serve your purpose if you define why you are using this annual tool, and it is definitely not to improve employee performance, as that should be a continual feedback process, and at least weekly.