The Metiss Group's Blog

Annual performance appraisals are an ineffective means of accelerating performance.  However, most organizations have an annual performance appraisal process and refuse to consider alternatives; another one of those “we’ve always done it this way” talent processes.  One of the first documented performance appraisal processes was from the 3rd century Chinese Wei dynasty.  They used a nine rank system by which officers were categorized based on their abilities.  The eighteen hundred year old format looks remarkably like many performance appraisal forms we see today.

In addition to the traditional reasons for abandoning annual performance appraisals (waste of time, ineffective, inflated scores), there are several recently developed arguments:

• Neuroscience advances have shown annual performance appraisals actually cause diminished brain functioning;
• The new generation of workers expect immediate feedback;
• Widespread team and matrix leadership methods are a poor fit for the annual performance appraisal process.

Fortunately, companies are moving away from annual performance appraisals.  From 2011 to 2012, the number of HR managers reporting abandoning annual performance appraisals tripled.  Many of those organizations are moving to informal quarterly performance reviews using a single summary sheet focused on a handful of forward-looking goals, past achievements, and have no numbers or ratings.

Empowered leaders abandon annual performance appraisals in favor of quarterly performance reviews and have more successful talent acceleration.

This entry was posted on May 18, 2018 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Leadership, Performance Acceleration. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.