I hate annual performance reviews. In fact, the only thing I like less than annual performance reviews is semi-annual performance reviews. I avoid them, dodging emails asking me to prepare, ducking comments made by my manager, and end up being dragged into them against my will by HR, full of anxiety and annoyance.
It's not that I get bad reviews. In fact, the reviews tend to be pretty positive for my career. I often end up above average, and my permanent record at most companies is devoid of black marks. But I still hate reviews, and still avoid them to this day. Hopefully my boss doesn’t read this, and if he does, hopefully he's ready for a little team penning.
I think reviews are something of a waste of corporate time, like many meetings, and likely were invented by some manager as a way of absolutely minimizing the amount of time he had to spend in face to face contact with his direct reports. By not managing people on a day to day basis, he could easily pack all that management into a one hour meeting a year.
Apparently I'm not the only one that feels this way. I ran across this article that mentions abolishing annual reviews to improve performance. It makes sense to me and I'd certainly be in favor of removing these reviews and letting (forcing?) managers to actually conduct them on a daily or weekly basis, without a meeting.
By giving feedback.
Talk to employees, take a measure of the work they do, let them know constantly if they are doing a good or bad job. Keep an open door, and let employees come talk with you about issues or career plans. And get rid of the annual performance review. We could certainly use one less meeting in our lives.
Steve Jones
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