Have you met a fan of the (name your adjective: cliched, outdated, crappy) yearly performance review? Me neither.
In corporate lore, the performance review is a time honored tradition. Every year, you sit across from your supervisor who tells you you meet expectations in most areas with a few areas of excellence and a few areas of improvement. On a five point scale, nobody gets a five or a one. And then repeat.
Is there a better way? Of course. But can you always implement that perfect way? Of course not. And that’s when we have to go back and figure out a way to work with constraints.
In a perfect world, the performance review itself would simply be a summary of the last year of real feedback, support, improvements and deficiencies. Since it is a summary, it would be quick to review and submit since all of the feedback is past tense, and any discussions and corrective actions would have been in the past as well. That leaves the performance appraisal as a final formality for record keeping purposes and to determine any performance based incentives or increases.
Of course, this cumulative performance review is a rarity. What is more likely is that the manager hustles around the last few weeks of the performance review period to try to remember what happened over the course of the last year. They might look back at notes they’ve taken or emails they’ve sent, but it is all pretty hopeless.
They’ll try to remember a couple of good things, a couple of bad things and then make the rest up. And it is easy to blame the manager, but especially in this day and age, it could be as likely that 20 plus direct reports plus 50-60 hours a week with no breaks could be the real culprit.
This has happened in good and bad workplace cultures, in big companies and little companies. There doesn’t have to be anything devious about it like is is often assumed. Sometimes, the perfect performance review is just perfectly out of reach.
Like many problems in the HR space, vendors try to ride in on their white horse to save the day. And seeing some of these products, I know that many of them could and would help. Dick Grote, our guest yesterday on TLNT Radio, made an excellent point about technology systems that simultaneously make it easier and more difficult to deal with the performance appraisal issue.
It’s good if you’re staying up to date on documentation and are good at that aspect of management, but it doesn’t help you much if you don’t (and, it can actually complicate things). Managers attempt to log hundreds of entries in the last few weeks of the performance review process to get their documentation up to snuff and it creates another layer in delivering an effective performance review.
So if you, like so many people, can’t do the perfect performance review and can only do the old fashioned “sit down across from me and let’s go over your performance” style of performance review, here are some ways to make it work as best as possible:
It is easy to say that if you’re not going to do a great performance review, don’t do one at all. But for those who have worked in an environment that couldn’t produce a great performance review, we know that good, or even okay, is better than nothing.
And while that shouldn’t be your end goal, you should at least get a handle on a yearly process before you attempt to jam through the perfect performance review.
