ALT-2 Should Employee Performance Reviews be Abolished – No
Many managers and employees may be tempted to say yes to the abolishment of performance reviews, but if they truly care about organizational and individual performance they would answer no. In society today performance matters and exceptional performance is more important than ever to maintain and grow any business. How many people would go to a restaurant more than once where the food was horrendous and the service was worse? Did the performance of the cook and the wait staff matter? You bet it did! Should the cook and the wait staff be held accountable for the quality of their work? I know the restaurant owner would say yes. I would even venture to say that the other cooks and wait staff would answer yes too. Without accountability for performance, there is little chance of improvement, and without improvement, there will be no business. Just because conducting and giving quality performance reviews is both difficult and time consuming to accomplish does not mean that it should be eliminated.
The difficultly that most managers face when asked to give performance reviews, is the lack of understanding of the performance management process and tools, the lack of documentation regarding the work in which their employee performed, unwillingness to differentiate performance, or fear of confrontation of underperforming employees. All of these challenges can be overcome through effective management training.
Performance management training needs to begin with basic understanding about and the purpose of the performance management system. The manager needs to understand that the performance management process starts before any employee is hired for a position. Effective performance management systems start with a quality job description that defines the duties and responsibilities for the job. Using job descriptions, managers should visualize and document the various level of performance for each the duties and responsibilities on the description. For example, high performance for a waiter would be to anticipate the customer's needs and take care of them before the customer asks. Average performance would be to respond to the customer's needs when they ask, and below performance would be to take care of the customer's needs after they ask multiple times. Once the manager has defined the standards for all levels of performance they can communicate the performance expectations to their employees, and hold them accountable for their results.
Managers need to understand that performance management must be a continual process, not a periodic one. One trap that many managers fall into is thinking about their employee's performance only once a year, when they are required to evaluate their employees for human resources. Continual performance management must include regular and periodic meetings with the employee to discuss their performance and documentation of both positive and negative performance occurrences. The best time to address performance problems is at the time it happens. It doesn't make sense to wait for a month or a year to address a performance issue that could have been addressed and corrected much earlier. Managers should also observe and recognize when an employee does something well. Recognizing positive behaviors increases the chances that they will be repeated. Managers who utilize the continual performance process to document performance throughout the year find it much less burdensome to complete their annual performance reviews when required.
One reason many managers may think that the elimination of employee performance reviews is a good idea is because they are afraid to confront their employee's poor performance, or they fail to see performance differences among their employees. However when a manager defines and communicates the performance expectations, continually reviews and communicates employee performance, their employees know their performance expectations, and their progress toward achieving them. Studies show that performance increases when the performer knows their performance expectations and aware they are being measured. When managers have multiple performance discussions with their employees throughout the year, they will discover that it is much easier to discuss the annual performance evaluations with them as well.
Through using a continual performance management strategy, you may wonder if you should abolish the periodic annual employee review in favor of the continual performance model. However there are numerous legal and financial reasons why companies should continue to use annual employee performance reviews.
Managers must understand that a performance review becomes a legal document once it has been completed. This legal document can and will be used to justify, promotional decisions, pay decisions, as well as employment decisions. There have been many discrimination and wrongful discharge lawsuits where employee performance evaluations were subpoenaed as evidence of wrongdoing. Companies that do not have well documented performance reviews often lose these cases, and thousands or millions of dollars in the process. Performance evaluations are often used to contest unemployment claims. If an employee was fired for poor performance, and their performance evaluation does not support this, the unemployment claim will be awarded.
Another important use for annual employee performance reviews is determining how to allocate merit increases. If annual documentation of performance did not exist, and every employee received the same cost of living pay adjustment, there would be little incentive to perform well on the job. Once the incentive for performance is removed, overall organizational performance suffers because the top performing employees are less willing to put out extra effort because they know that it will not be recognized or rewarded.
The employee performance review is a much too valuable tool to be abolished, since it not only ensures individual performance and accountability, but also ensures the organization's very survival as a company.
