Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

Coaching is not a purpose of a performance review. The coaching and communication should be an ongoing process that happens before the review. Problems should be brought up early enough that you have a chance to change or improve before it gets to the point of being written in a review. If this doesn't happen, it's a sign that the manager is either terrible at communication, not even trying to coach and improve their employees, or even sabotaging you on purpose.

Instead, the purpose of performance reviews is documentation. It can be for good or for bad, depending on the person's performance. It makes info available to others and preserves it in case you transfer departments, your manager leaves, etc. Like any other documentation, it creates overhead, but you have to weigh that against the value it provides, and IMHO that's what should determine whether you do it (and how often).

Today I have my own company and I try to hire the same type of person. It is a profile increasingly hard to find. Someone who "needs" a review is typically not a good fit for my management style, and someone who can anticipate the needs of my business I try very hard to retain.

The bigger the company the more likely it is to have very elaborate ass coverage when it comes to these things. So, keep in mind that it might be less about you and more about them when you are having that conversation. They are required to have that conversation with you. It's not optional; it's a box that must be ticked.

However, performance reviews are not necessarily a bad thing and I've had some great managers give me great advice. I would just add that a good manager would not wait until the review if things aren't going great and some of the best managers I worked with made a point out of doing regular one on ones. Coaching happens outside of performance reviews. Performance reviews are also your opportunity to speak up. I once pointed out that I had nothing but good reviews but no recent raise. It went up the chain, they checked their records, and I got my raise. It was a modest one but it felt important to me. These things work both ways.

I tend to work with people from East Coast finance world, and they not too keen on the touchy feely story telling stuff. Its sort of expected that you have to have thick skin and get to the point.

I've lived through unfair, biased and unhelpful perf reviews, I know what it's like to have this sky beam open up out of nowhere and vaporize you over absurd nonsense, but in a company of > 100 people you need a paper record of performance.

If you're a VP and suddenly someone asks, "Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?" What are you to go off of? Just a manager's recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased?

Unfair performance reviews are usually a byproduct of bad managers. For ex: I knew fellow managers who never told reports what they were doing wrong, they'd wait til the end-of-the-year review and write vicious stuff. Why? It was hard to say face-to-face.

That's cowardly and not good mgt: you meet weekly or biweekly to discuss all issues, a well-run perf review is a boring rubber stamp on the 25 things you've been discussing all year.

This author suggests that employees present managers "handwritten notes" of their performance "in a notebook every 6-12 months." Guess what-- that's a performance review! As if the problem w/perf reviews was the formality of the process and not the human judgment being applied.

Again, I get it: performance reviews suck. But I think it's not the paperwork or the process, it's that management can be very inept at evaluating talent periodically, regardless of how that process is run.

Unfortunately, it's hard to run a company of > 100 people without written records of performance (especially if someone sues).

In the context of judging us against our peers, it is isn't for us (so of course it's a waste of time for us), or our direct managers, but for upper management. The value there depends on the quality and candidness of feedback. Can this information be totally gleaned from task or ticket tracking systems? I don't think that tells the whole picture.

OK, so is it necessary for upper management to have this data? In a perfect world, this feedback data finds employees with great potential, ASAP and tracks their growth over time, from manager to manager and team to team, but since I'm a lowly professional and not upper management, I have no insight into how this is actually used.

In a lot of instances annual review (or any long cycle review) serve a very important bureaucratic purpose for employees: getting raises (and/or promotions). Nearly everything else in a performance review should be handled in some other way, but it's hard to push management into the position to reward an employee financially outside of such a formal setting. This comes with the disclaimer that if your company sees value in performance reviews (and therefore chooses to have them) than it probably also is the type of company where getting a raise outside of a formal setting is hard.

[1] https://hbr.org/2015/04/reinventing-performance-management

If you want constructive feedback to build your career you need to find a personal mentor, build a relationship, and regularly check in to both provide updates and solicit feedback.

Perhaps we need to just accept that the compensation systems will never be fair, and managers will just promote and pay the people they like and fire or keep stagnant the employees they don't like.

I liked the idea of the self review, and doing that once or twice a year, as a good stepping off point for a discussion on career pathing, but in general, no one should ever be surprised by anything that would come up in that discussion, otherwise you haven't been a good manager.

It's up to the manager to make sure the feedback discussion happens often, and not wait for the employee to ask or wait for a formal review period.

My boss generally has a pretty good idea how my work is going, the position I'm in means no word is good word anyways. A lot of times its hard to figure out how to answer a question in a way that doesn't read pointless or express my utter disdain for performance reviews.

Having said that, there are situations where performance reviews are a more pragmatic option. As a consultant, I interact daily with my client management, but I can go weeks without any meaningful interaction with my consulting company management. We do check in regularly, and as-needed outside the regular sessions, but my consulting management doesn't take part in my day-to-day work. In order to adequately assess my performance, they need to solicit feedback from client peers and client management. This is a burdensome process that is more practical to perform on a three or six month cycle.

None of this precludes feedback and assessment more frequently, however without the day-to-day observation, some schedule and formality help. I suspect there are many other situations in which people do not work directly with their management.

Besides purposes related to either helping employees grow or covering the company's backside if they need to fire someone, reviews serve another important purpose: they're a way to factor out biases in the award of raises, promotions, and equity. If you don't have performance reviews, these things are guaranteed to be a matter of the managers' subjectivity and bias. If you do have performance reviews, they can be compared to one another both within and across teams to ensure that the results don't favor anyone on the basis of anything except measured merit. That's absolutely essential in any workplace that we could consider modern.

We tend to remember most recent things and assign them greater value. This means that if a below-average colleague did something phenomenal a month before the review, they will receive a more favorable review. Along the same vein, if a well-performing colleague slips up right before review time, this will unfairly penalize her. Annual performance reviews are bad because they are done 50 weeks too late.

We've been trying to address this at the current company I am working with. At 15Five we are building tools for continuous employee feedback and performance assessment.

There should be multiple communication processes going on all at once, with different cadence, that all add up to one's perception of an employee's performance.

We have weekly check ins, which are meant to be answered in less than 15 minutes and reviewed in less than five (hence the name!). People set goals one week and rate them the next. This has a biweekly cadence. Longer terms objectives and key results can be tracked as well, usually on a monthly or quarterly. All this feeds into a performance review, which ideally should happen quarterly, but can be done less often. The difference is that you don't spend a week before the performance review is due trying to remember how each of your team members did. You have that right in front of you, as you've spent the last X months interacting with them, having conversations, and earmarking notable feedback and conversations.

Our customers are happy with this process as an alternative to annual performance reviews.

During my time at Yahoo the process was an absolute joke as leadership was changing on the daily. When I was a PM at Intuit, I received feedback which I still leverage years after the fact.

People shouldn't feel like performance reviews are the only way to receive feedback. Feedback needs to happen regularly, not on an annual basis. Feedback should also come from people you respect, not the people your boss tells you to listen to at work.

Coincidentally, this is an area I have a lot of passion for given I was a HORRIBLE boss at my last company (acquired by Atlassian): https://medium.com/matter-app/you-matter-d7a0b07d078b

I'm also working to fix this problem, if anyone's interested in chatting on the topic or interested in fixing the problem... brett@matterapp.com

I think they can be brilliant, and they can be awful. It depends on the approach of the manager and their subordinate.

Here's what i take away from a company saying i need to do a self evaluation.

1) The company is not going to take my evaluation of myself for any adjustment in position or salary.

2) Therefore it is their attempt to make me be a better employee without any regard to any responsibilities on their side. Sure i'm all for trying to be a better employee, but this is disingenuous.

3) If my boss could accurately evaluate me, i wouldn't need to evaluate myself.

4) The fact that the company requires me to self evaluate, tells me that they suspect that my boss may not be able to do so. Why, i assume it's either because they believe that either my boss doesn't really know what i do, or won't evaluate me fairly for personal or other non business important reasons.

5) If the company is concerned about their management in this regard, and yet continue to have them in those positions without much followup, they don't think very highly of my retention.

Luckily, i have come to realize that even though this is exactly how I feel when asked to be involved in this process, it's likely not the real reason.

One has to remember that HR personnel also want to improve and grow their careers, which entails being able to articulate value propositions to the company as well. How do they do this. Keeping the status quo doesn't get you promoted. Introducing new evaluation processes, including self evaluations, 360 degree evaluations, and other new cutting edge HR policies will.

So likely this onerous new process you are involved in that makes you feel slimy, is just because the HR group needs to justify their positions... which of course should say what you need to know about how you are valued.

Yes, yes, YES!

When I solicit feedback for people on my team, I always remind everyone that anonymous feedback is the worst. Honest, direct feedback is incredibly valuable.

Feedback should be the catalyst for a conversation; not a one time statement to be interpreted or ignored.

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.

Some people like getting told what they're doing right and wrong.

I base my own "performance review" on my skillset and what the market is paying. If the market is willing to pay me more than the company I'm working for - it's time to jump ship.

But I don't ignore performance reviews. I take them as constructive criticism. Even if they are "unfair", I assess what I could have done differently either technically or politically not to be in that position.

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...

Managers, acting politically, will blame failures on subordinates or push out top performers who could prove a threat to their own job security.

Formalized performance reviews feed many problems by increasing the amount of politics: - Managers looking to increase headcount might avoid giving feedback to average or below performers. - Stack ranking makes it difficult to recognize multiple good performers and forces you to recognize average performers

In that role, they can work very well. (My role being one of observation, not use of / manipulation.) Of course, they aren't really even trying to objectively measure and improve performance.

I mean, they work well for furthering the politics and furthering the ambitions of those in control of the review process.

I didn't find this very productive, in terms of the organizational performance nor, long-term, well-being. Existing powers become entrenched, and turf becomes more important than progress.

Eventually, "outsiders" are brought in, one way or another, to break this up. And most of them know very well and make a career of putting themselves first.

The review process tends to be or become separated from day-to-day work and communication. It exists "out-of-band", and it can end up -- including deliberately -- uninformed by and mis-informed about that actual day-to-day and project results.

I.e. It's very easy to manipulate. And there are always people more than willing to take advantage of this.

Every company is different, but for some traditional companies Reflektive works with them to initially roll out Performance Reviews because companies have dedicated budget for it. Then, once they're comfortable with our tools, our Customer Success team partners with them to craft a roll-out plan for our "Check Ins" product, which is a lightweight feedback tool intended on used every 3 months. For Check Ins, it's meant to be purely about development; at Reflektive, our Check Ins contain no performance rating scores nor do we use it for compensation (we have a separate process for that).

The good news is that a LOT of companies, ranging from small startups to large 50k-employee enterprise companies, actually want to shift towards a more employee-driven model. Our team's number one priority right now is to empower employees/managers to own their own feedback process and to increase the frequency of feedback between managers and their teams. I'm super excited about what's coming down the pipeline!

[1]https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1df5MALZKZU6lOeIXUiO-...

I guess the odds were in my favor.

A simple rule for employees: If your raise/bonus is bad, then they want you to quit. If it's good, then they want you to stay.

In my experience, I've found that they've lead to an, "oh, I better get out of this place ASAP," or, "oh, there's a problem with my manager that I better raise ASAP with his boss."

They spend SO MUCH time on it, for a thing that is mostly irrelevant to how things seem to operate. It’s not like drastic changes are being made to peoples’ salaries or hours off it. Or job titles.

That is more purpose than most of your work has, if you really look at it from a bird perspective.

> A performance review is supposed to be a tool for learning and career development.

This is the misunderstnading. If a politician says he's going to lower taxes, we laugh about it. But when a CEO says he wants to do performance reviews because he cares about how good his worker bees are we believe it? He mostly cares about his bonus and having people clap at his brilliant presentations.

Here's why you are not being promoted this year...

Here's what you need to do to be promoted next year...

Here's why you only got X increase in salary...

Here's what you can do to get a bigger increase next year...

If you are satisfied at your current level, here's what you should keep doing to stay in it...

Keep a file on each one of your direct reports. In it, keep notes about their accomplishments, failures, etc. Also, note how they reacted to those. Note any feedback from peers.

Give constant feedback throughout the year.

Be fair in your assessment.

Formulate a succession plan. This includes things like who will take your place when you get promoted as well as who will take the place of your team lead when they move away.

Finally, and this is the most important takeaway, there should never be any surprises in a performance review. EVER. The person being reviewed should go in knowing what they'll receive based on the constant feedback.

This is all management 101 stuff.

It doesn't seem like a good system if the person being reviewed can just select friends for reviews. Conversely, if you only sample a select group, you can surface grudges. An employee with a grudge can be "honest" in their feedback and completely turn a review.

It's just subjective all the way down. You could have managers "interpret" the results and compile them, but that leaves their own biases.

Corporate structure usually has a ceiling for raises in the department, so there needs to be a paper trail on how that gets divided.

If a manager or the company isn't aware of this then they're not paying attention; you shouldn't have to do their job for them.

"What have I done for myself?"

What? Who cares? That's my business.

"What do I want to be when I grow up? (And what do I need to get there?)"

I'm already grown up, do you think you hired children? If of course you meant what do I want to be by next review, well the easy answer is more adept and better paid, hopefully with your help.

It's the conversation together about what the next chapter could be and should be that can be really valuable.

If there is a performance problem with somebody who happens to be a minority, documented performance reviews that are handled the same for all employees are necessary to show that the employee was not promoted or dismissed or disciplined due to bias.

Q: What is the goal? What are the problems or opportunities it is addressing? A: Be as "fair" as possible in determining raises and promotions, attempting to control for different roles / projects / levels / external factors.

Q: What is the cost? A: 2-4 weeks of company time each year.

Q: Is the process achieving that goal, for an acceptable cost? A: Yes... how else would you accomplish this goal?

On the flip side, I find very few of my reports want to hear negative feedback. It takes a while to build the trust to enable it.

A "Shadow Belief" is an assumption we make without even knowing it's an assumption.

Thinking you can only hear peer feedback from your boss or during an annual formal review is a shadow belief.

You don't need your boss or some stupid process! Ask the people who work with who you respect and do it often.

The major issues with performance reviews almost always come down to poor execution. The whole "Performance Reviews Suck" mirrors the whole "Agile Sucks" in that in principal it can be good, but in practice, it rarely is. Most of it falls on how a manager handles a review, but part of it falls on how an employee receives feedback, as well.

So on to my counterpoints: At the one place and under the one manager, Lou, in my job history where performance reviews worked really well I managed to receive among the worst performance review I have ever received. The score, as it stood, was fine -- I was a top performer at the company and it was hard to argue with the results -- I scored "exceeds" in every category. The criticism, however, was rough -- it was honest, direct and after reading it, I couldn't disagree with any of it very well. I had a great manager who both understood where I excelled and recognized areas where I could grow. He started out the review with "Before you freak out . . . " and went on to explain that the scores and the comments are not going to feel like they're not in full agreement[0]. He explained that the yearly review[1] is about growth, and growth requires feedback, that he didn't need to tell me how well I was doing because we both knew how well I was doing and that his goal is to specifically find areas where I can improve and put a plan together on how he was going to help me get there[2]. A bit of my feedback involved written communication to business managers, "identifying what's important" and throwing the rest out. My comment history will shine the light on the fact that I'm long-winded -- I type fast like the rest of you and I read very fast, so neither receiving or sending a long message is a burden. He did several screen sharing sessions with me to hone my communications, he gave me several books (some from his personal collection) to help me to round out my engineering skills, encouraged me to look at languages and technologies that had different programming paradigms than I was used to. It resulted in me studying a lot of areas that had little to do with my job as a primarily Microsoft-centric developer, but all of it resulted in me becoming a much better developer.

In the right hands, a performance review can be very powerful. It provided a formal time slot to sit down and talk specifically about ways to improve at what I loved doing. A lot of folks would think, "Well, your manager should be doing that, anyway" -- sure -- and in a couple of decades of having a career in engineering, the only time this has happened was under a formal review with all of two of the 15 or so people that I have worked for. For whatever reason, people are unwilling to offer criticism like this outside of that setting, and most of them are unwilling to offer it within that setting for a high-performing employee. And why should they? The high-performers aren't the ones they have to spend time on! And honestly, I would have been more comfortable had he not shared these negative aspects of my performance with me -- they weren't a "big deal", they weren't affecting the great ratings -- leave well enough alone! But the fact that he did bring these things to my attention made me better at what I love doing. I didn't get higher ratings at the next review (though I received feedback about how well I handled the feedback from the last review), and I received far fewer negatives in the process.

Since having that manager, I have told every other manager I report to that "I'm comfortable with receiving criticism" and that I value that kind of feedback, a lot. It hasn't made a terribly large amount of difference in the kind of reviews I've received, unfortunately, but my hope is that by putting that out there, I disarm a manager who is afraid of losing a top-performer as a result of negative feedback.

I've never had to give a review (as a manager; I've done a ton of peer reviews), but the advice I'd offer is: (1) Everyone has something they want to do better and can do better -- call it out. Maybe they don't even realize it's a problem. I didn't! (2) Don't just point it out, commit to working with the employee on the area they received feedback on. (3) Disarm the employee, particularly if their score is high as they'll not expect to see negative feedback. Start with compliments and move into areas of improvement; be as self-deprecating as possible[3]. (4) Actually do the things you set out to do to help your employee. (5) Limit the happy stuff, don't sugar coat the bad stuff[4].

That last point might seem off, and it is -- this only works if you had a boss like the one I had -- he was a great communicator and regularly provided feedback on the positive side. So when he started off the review with "You know how valued you are and how well you do your job", it wasn't placating or dismissive -- I legitimately knew by the flexibility I was given and the constant feedback I received. He was a master at criticising the act rather than the individual, as well, which is something I'd love to be better at.

[0] The comments started off explaining all of the areas that I excel in, but were terse and similarly direct.

[1] This manager also did quarterly less-but-still-somewhat-formal reviews, as well, which I valued.

[2] This was a key point, to me. It was a recognition that part of his job was to make me better and that he wasn't sending me off with negative feedback and expecting me to figure it out -- he was generating work for himself, as well. Honestly, I felt pretty miserable about this particular review for about a month, but during that month, he followed up almost every day on one of the points we discussed and spent several hours providing advice and directly working with me to improve on the areas that he felt I needed help with. I realized that it would have been a lot easier for him to say "atta-boy" and be done with it.

[3] My boss explained that he had the same problem "focusing messages" -- he'd spent an hour with his manager at a prior job agonizing over words in sentences trying to reduce content to a bit over a few tweets without diluting the message. I don't know if that was entirely true (except that this boss was also, easily, the most ethical person I've ever reported to).

[4] As in, don't minimize the negatives, brush them off, or try to find ways that the negative is a positive -- it's placating and dishonest about the intent.

I will readily agree that most common systems unnecessarily bundle multiple high stake issues. For example, most people (me included from time to time) stop listening past "you get a raise of x%" in an annual review.

However, 1 wrong thing (i.e. unnecessary bundling") doesn't invalidate whole whole process.

For example, most performance processes involve goal-setting (I don't know about you, but I find that very very appealing), performance evaluation against goals, soft skill review (i.e. how much do you stress out your teammates?), and plan of action for the next year. Have I received career changing advices through performance review? You bet I have. For example, I pick software engineering because of distribution of my grades (performance review at K12 level!). For another example, don't make stupid & potentially misunderstood jokes.

Sure, continuous & informal feedbacks are important. However, so are formal processes, including feedback and evaluation. Have I improved? How the hell would I know if I don't have things noted down? Should I be promoted? How the hell would another person know if there is no papertrail of evidence of excellence? What am I good at? What role should I play in this team? How should I grow? All of these questions require careful contemplation over behaviors and performance in a long period (a year or at least a few months). Maybe all of you Bill Gates are so smart that you don't need them. But I am mere mortal, and I love feedback.

So, for the love of craftmanship, dedicate time and resources to performance review. It will only matter WHEN YOU MAKE IT MATTER. That's the thing. You can drive the best car the in the world badly if you hate driving. Similarly, if you think that you are so smart that no system can properly evaluate you, well, the system will fail. To be more precise, you fail the system.

When reviews are once or at most twice a year they don't provide guidance a manager should be providing full time. All they are a means for a company to protect themselves from recrimination.

That's not the case in all companies, but for many rings true.

I've read through most of the comments posted thus far, and I'm far from surprised with the varying sentiment. We run into this at Eager Labs, where we facilitate 360s, performance assessments, and more, for companies. Because we actually embed ourselves within the organizations, I get an opportunity to see how different company cultures trigger different reactions to the process of delivering feedback.

A few things we've observed from our work so far that might be interesting to those following this thread:

[1] For many employees, sitting down with their manager and having a conversation around performance is the thing they value the most. This often occurs because the manager doesn't regularly do this as a part of a 1:1 cadence. Having a formalized time where the company "mandates" this conversation can be a useful forcing function when some managers are less willing / apt to have these conversations on their own.

[2] Getting peers to provide actionable feedback is a real challenge. We've invested a lot of time in crafting our process (both in software, and in a workshop we run) to guide people towards providing less feedback along the lines of "Great job, keep it up", and towards S.B.I.A feedback, (Situation - Behavior - Impact - Action). Even if you have something positive to say to someone, give a concrete example of a situation where they exhibited a positive behavior, how that impacted you, and any actions you want them to take going forward. For example, "When you speak up in meetings and share your opinions, it helps me to feel more empowered to share my own thoughts. I'd love to see you speak up more frequently, if not for your own benefit, than for mine!"

[3] Giving regular feedback is great, but make sure you avoid giving 'drive by feedback'. Knowing the right moment to deliver praise or critiques is a skill, and a lot of peers / managers don't know when the right moment is to deliver feedback. For example, as an engineer, one of the most challenging times to personally receive critical feedback is right after a really hard push to deliver some massive new feature or product. The feedback may be totally valid, but knowing WHEN to provide that feedback can be the difference between it being motivating and just discouraging. So, while I totally agree that "feedback should be a regular part of any peer, manager, or mentee relationship", finding the appropriate times to deliver said feedback matters just as much as the feedback itself.

[4] There is no one size fits all solution for performance reviews or feedback. Whether it's what questions to ask, how to deliver the feedback, or what the cadence should be of delivering that feedback... Every team, department, and organization has unique wrinkles that make them special. We end up spending a lot of time customizing our assessments down at the team level for this very reason, because we find that what makes a sales organization tick is wildly different than an engineering department, and while there may be cultural overlap because of company values, they each have their own needs. This is why it can often be challenging for an HR / People Ops department to craft a process that works for the entire company, which may result in a lot of people having a sour experience.

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to share their thoughts so far on this thread. It's been a real pleasure to read.

What? A performance review is never something I've dreaded. They're just a regular, mundane, thing that happens. They tell you 'good job' give you your raise, which is sometimes just cost of living, sometimes it's $3 to $5k, and then you go back to your desk and go back to work.

It just feels like it's a standard in place to make sure people get income bumps every years. I don't think it's as big a deal as the author is claiming.

Seriously, what performance reviews in 2018 don't involve a self appraisal? Pretty much everything he recommends has been part of the performance review process at my company for the last 8 years. And I'm not saying our process couldn't be improved, but this article offers no real insights of any kind.

Real World: X depends on your livelihood.

18 months I’m a team leader myself and they sent me on the course for doing reviews. And there they taught me the first thing you should always say is “if I took a poll...”

The whole system is toxic

Maybe that wouldn't work everywhere, but it's tripled my starting salary.