Performance Reviews: Making Things Worse?

 

Readers of this blog and elsewhere on gantthead have expressed strong feelings when it comes to managers, leadership and promotions. It is that important a topic for project managers. Managers may be project stakeholders, functional managers in the business, or actual dedicated project supervisors. Their skills scan make or break a project.

It is high time one particular related topic be aired out: annual performance reviews.

Is there anyone out there anymore who actually supports annual performance reviews? 

There has been a growing expert chorus against these reviews  recently and this has generated a serious response in agreement. Back in 2008, Samuel Culbert wrote this Wall Street Journal article to bash performance reviews. It got such a strong reaction, he wrote a book about the subject that came out this year. It is meekly titled Get Rid of the Performance Review!, and makes a very strong case. 

An excerpt: 

"Don't get me wrong: Reviewing performance is good; it should happen every day. But employees need evaluations they can believe, not the fraudulent ones they receive. They need evaluations that are dictated by need, not a date on the calendar. They need evaluations that make them strive to improve, not pretend they are perfect.

In fact, if firms did nothing else but just kill off this process they'd immediately be better off. When it comes to performance reviews, there's no question that nothing is better than something. That's how bad they are."

NPR interviews with the author appear here (where, I think, the phrase "total baloney" is used) and here.

Another example:  An article appeared in the Hartford Business Review Performance Reviews: Hate To Give Them, Hate To Get Them.

Some of my take-aways from these articles and interviews:

• Annual performance reviews do not have a foundation in excellent performance management techniques.
• One historical driver for annual performance reviews is to create a paper trail to support any needed terminations. (Not a very positive/constructive foundation, is it?)
• Among the major results of these reviews are intimidation by boss and "destruction of workforce morale."
• Tactics used to make these reviews more objective do not work. The fact that they are "marketed" as objective simply adds to the employee frustration.
• The connection between performance and pay is in reality firm as taffy
• Research shows that bosses do not like to give them, employees don't like to get them and productivity goes down in the weeks before and the weeks after the event.

In my experience, there have been "better" performance review programs and very bad programs. When my managers have not been supported in their duties as a manager of people and when they have not provided "feedback" more often than a few times a year, frankly the reviews were a joke and I lost respect in the company's ability to manage its own affairs.

Next week, we'll look at alternatives or supplements to the beloved annual performance review. Until then…

• What do you think of annual (or periodic) performance reviews?
• What has been inneffective or damaging in your experiences (on either side of the review program)?
• Do you support annual performance review programs?