Long Past Due to End Performance Reviews – Yes

From 3arf

It is long past due to bury performance reviews forever. There are absolutely no redeeming aspects to them. How on earth did this archaic, puerile, schoolroom practice creep into adult workplaces in the first place? This dreaded, annual ritual does nothing but create enormous havoc, on-going personal and corporate damage, eat into the bottom line and bloat personnel departments. Managements that focus on the strengths of their employees, communicate with them daily, set goals, plan, brief and debrief, and reward on the basis of tangible results do not need to spend one dime on performance reviews.

Here are some real examples of the havoc I have personally seen created by work reviews:

- Two-way reviews. The manager reviews the employee, and the employee reviews the manager. Result: caustic workplace full of dysfunction, hatred and distrust.

- Subjective reviews by incompetent managers, with valuable employees leaving as a result and the incompetent managers continuing on in their jobs.

- Hazy, intangible performance goals with no way to measure them - not that the measurement matters, because the goals aren't followed up between reviews in any event.

- Anonymous reviews: unattributed, negative comments appearing in reviews, with no opportunity for the reviewed employees to respond to the anonymous reviewers.

- Personnel managers actually discussing employees' reviews with other employees.

- Other people's bad behaviour showing up in reviews.

- An excellent employee's review hijacked by a couple of tricky situations during the year, focusing on the negative instead of the greater positive.

- Hours and hours, days and days and months and months of time spent coming to terms with unfair reviews or having them rectified.

- Reviews done under the guise of models for determining salary increases, only to have greatly deserved increases sabotaged by salary and level grids, with no chance of jumping the grid to be rewarded for beyond-the-extra-mile work; instead, receiving the same bonus as average workers on the grid, who have not gone one extra mile.

- Detoured career paths resulting from unfair, less-than-satisfactory reviews.

These are just a few examples I have witnessed in the workplace over a number of years and various organizations, affecting thousands of good employees. The damage is ubiquitous.

Performance reviews are supposed to be private and confidential; however, they are always widely discussed, and the anger is palpable for months and years. That's how we all become all too aware of the downside of this nasty practice. There is no place for reviews in a modern organization that values its workforce, takes pride in excellent management and avoids wasting hard-earned money.

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