I think few people will mourn the passing of that modern
instrument of torture: the annual performance review.
I think that’s good news and bad news.
Accenture announced this week that it will join the short
list of companies (including Microsoft) that have made a high-profile decision to abandon the hated annual
performance review in their human relations practices.
I bet everybody at Accenture is happy.
In terms of instant gratification, scrapping the performance
review is good news. In my experience, just about everyone hated it. Managers
hated preparing and conducting the review, and staffers hated being subjected
to it. In my experience, most reviews were done poorly, if at all; quite a
large percentage of them were done at the very last minute by harried managers
who rushed to get them done by deadline; many reviews were done late and in a
perfunctory way; many reviews were pretty much a repeat of the previous year’s
crop. Almost all reviews—and goals, and promises, and benchmarks, and training
expectations, and self-improvement commitments—were forgotten more or less
immediately. In my experience, most managers didn’t have the guts, and didn’t
have backup from top management, to do performance reviews in any honest way.
The bad news is that I’m pretty sure that Accenture and
companies like it won't replace the hated performance review system with any
worthwhile, durable, systematic way of giving performance feedback and
developmental feedback to employees. Most managers aren’t trained or
experienced enough to do this well. Most companies don’t have the guts to
legitimately link pay with performance, and give bigger paychecks to the folks
who do outstanding work.
It seems like it should be a no-brainer for a manager to
routinely and persistently tell a staffer about both the outstanding and
improvable aspects of her performance, and to help the employee to do
commendable work that supports the company’s goals. It seems like it should be
a no-brainer to give a bigger paycheck to the staffers who do a great job.
In fact, in most corporate cultures, that’s impossible.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
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