Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
blog.bradfieldcs.com
Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
1–10 of 342 posts
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#2I’ve always found my performance reviews to be very useful, and people’s feedback extremely insightful.
I think they can be brilliant, and they can be awful. It depends on the approach of the manager and their subordinate.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#3Great advise, also highly relevant on the same/ similar matter: https://hackernoon.com/12-manager-readmes-from-silicon-valle...
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#4"What is the best career advice you’ve ever received? Odds are it wasn’t from an annual performance review."
I guess the odds were in my favor.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#5At my current employer, we completely reinvented our performance management [1] and it has worked out to be so much better. We spend less time on coming up with arbitrary goals and really focus on strengths and developmental needs. The overhead involved with spending a lot of unproductive hours on performance has been minimized. The conversations are really about what people have contributed, what their strengths are, and how the firm can support their development goals. Also, by using our new performance management system, the conversations around promotions and such are much more streamlined and data-centric. Overall, the expectations of both sides are better managed.
[1] https://hbr.org/2015/04/reinventing-performance-management
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#6Good stuff, although I think the "what do I want to be when I grow up" question is needlessly infantilizing. Much better is something like, "what am I trying to accomplish?"
For peer feedback, I strongly recommend a trick I stole from my last boss: manager interviews of the employee's peers. You ask the employee for some people who they've worked closely with, mix add in others you think would give good perspective, and then do a short (30-60 mins), structured interview with open-ended questions and follow-up on patterns.
With that material in hand, a manager can write up a peer feedback digest that I think is way more useful than what normally comes out of the process.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#7I feel like articles sometimes elicit a certain "no shit" reaction, but then don't really dig in to solutions.
Specifically around the mechanism of the performance review, this piece is pretty practical for framing thinking about an alternative approach: https://medium.com/the-carrot-or-the-stick/the-performance-r...
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#8I’ve always found my performance reviews to be very useful, and people’s feedback extremely insightful. I think they can be brilliant, and they can be awful. It depends on the approach of the manager and their subordinate.
You are lucky. I have never had a really useful review. We also do 360s but you never get the real comments but only a compiled version which then is also not very useful.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#9At least part of the high cost can be explained by HR departments wanting to hedge their bets in case someone needs to be fired for cause. Having a well documented paper trail of reviews which demonstrates that an employee was unfit or underperforming is the surest way to avoid a lawsuit if it comes to that. Whether or not it is worth a couple of hours of every employees' time every year is up for debate.
Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
#10One of my friends hated when they cancelled performance reviews at his company.
Some people like getting told what they're doing right and wrong.