How Adobe Got Rid of Traditional Performance Reviews

Performance reviews should be given in the context of preset goals. Without defined goals, a review is pointless. You might as well be commenting on the weather for all it is worth.

I break my goals up into three general categories when I give them: tactical, strategic, and developmental. Tactical items are boring shit, do your job, close your tickets, answer the phone, etc. Strategic goals push the business forward, assist on a project, visit a customer, or implement a new thing. Developmental goals are all about you: attend some training, mentor a peer, or learn a new thing.

Goals should evolve with the employee. Have you just started? I'm giving you goals to familiarize yourself with the business. Sit with the CS team, the sales team, or some of the product meetings. Have you been here forever? I'm giving you responsibility to mentor peers, do some lunch and learns, or take on a new project. Craft goals for your team to fill gaps in the team's capabilities and to shape key employees for advancement.

Performance reviews aren't inherently bad, they provide a really clear milestone or report on how you're meeting these goals. We'll talk about them weekly during our one on ones, but this codifies what we've been discussing into something more tangible. They're where the rubber meets the road and seeing yourself rated on your goals really calls attention to performance.

Reviews and goals may sound like corporate bullshit to you, but that's just because your manager sucks. I've had several excellent managers who leverage goals to push me towards new opportunities. My reviews are largely a formality, I know where I stand with my manager, but I don't think that's the case with most employees. Perhaps I just haven't been burned badly enough by bad managers in the past.

The last time I worked as a permanent employee, yearly appraisals were built out of three factors:

a) Performance against defined goals.

b) Helping the company meet its social programme.

c) Moving the company forward.

... with the last two undefined. People could go into their appraisal with all their defined goals met, only to be told they'd only got 1/3 of what was needed.

Just before I left they changed it again to stress they wanted everyone to go above and beyond, so simply meeting your objectives would in future get a "progressing" result, which was below average. There was, literally, no way to guarantee a favourable result without playing politics.

That said, however, I don't think I'd like the solution where the system just works better. My ideal solution would be to have no annual goals or targets at all (which is the position I'm in currently as a contractor).

I don't think it's an understatement to say that my opinion is that metrics are amongst the most evil things ever invented in the corporate world, and frequently the root of all trouble.

In case that seems a hyperbolic statement, I'm thinking for example of the sub-prime issues which almost brought down the world financial systems and was in my opinion caused by the needs of some managers to put sales figures above ethics to make their yearly targets.