Are Performance Reviews a Thing of the Past?

Annual performance reviews have been a mainstay of employee management for decades. Many companies still go through the yearly ritual, striving to create a record of performance and to give employees concrete feedback on their work. But do performance reviews really lead to maximum performance – or should we abandon them altogether?

With the rise of reliance on temporary employees and the rapid turnover in the workforce as professionals move from job to job, many companies are abandoning the yearly review in favor of project-based appraisals. Here’s why:

  1. The single annual review doesn’t really help employee engagement or performance. According to a Harvard Business Review poll, 58 percent of business executives believe that an annual performance review doesn’t do much to improve their employees’ engagement or performance. These leaders realize that a once-a-year examination of the employee’s work doesn’t provide the kind of real-time, concrete feedback needed to do better day to day.
  2. Specific feedback helps employees improve specific assignments. When you were in school, most of your teachers probably gave several assignments, quizzes, and tests over the course of the semester and provided feedback on each, instead of letting your entire grade ride on a single final exam. More and more companies are discovering that this model works better for teaching employees, too. When employees have specific feedback on specific assignments, they know how to do the next assignment more effectively and efficiently.
  3. Closer assessment demands better measurement. Most managers know that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” By evaluating employees’ work on a project-by-project basis, managers must develop measurements in real time, test them against the results, and adapt them to ensure they are providing an accurate assessment of the goals and outcomes that matter most to the organization as a whole. By contrast, the annual performance review uses a metric that is re-examined only once a year – and that may be hopelessly outdated by the time the next performance review season arrives.

At THE RIGHT STAFF, LLC, our recruiters strive to help each client find the right talent for the job. Contact us today to learn more about our staffing services in Minneapolis and beyond.

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