Please, if anyone has ideas about what a good performance management SaaS would look like - share!
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-...
If you've been giving them actionable feedback throughout the year, then it should be as simple as "here is your new salary and your new title" and no one should be surprised about anything.
(Not to defend performance reviews explicitly--there may be a much better approach that accomplishes the same goal)
Sure, those disagreements still happen. But, when things are transparent, there's very little risk of a "system breakdown" and a very high chance that a dissatisfied employee (who doesn't seem to be performing well in our scenario) will leave to make room for someone with more potential.
Edit: I just noticed the GP was jedberg; we both spent enough time at Netflix to see what each of us is describing work well in practice. :)
In perfect world I'd have a mind-reading powered live dashboard I could check that shows a graph of anonymized averages of my perceived performance across broad categories (teams, peers vs subordinates vs leadership, etc.) and a single point for my direct report.
Getting feedback each year when there's no surprises feels like a formality and waste of time. In the rare case that there are any surprises it's disappointing and I get to make adjustments months late, having been left in the dark.
IME reviews are like icebergs: the conversation is the easy part and pretty small. But there's a lot going on behind the scenes throughout the year, and it's useful to have a process to base that off of. For instance, someone has to balance your recommendation for your employee's new salary and title against your peer's recommendation for their employee's new salary and title. And so your performance review information has to be sufficient to make that case to your management.
Performance reviews, in my experience, have been very heavily weighted towards politics over underlying performance.
Not one sentence about my work as a software engineer; not one sentence about specific interactions that were problematic, or whether or not I had been reported for anything. Just vague as can be.
Companies are using performance reviews to try to tackle two things: Compensation (bonuses, promotions) & feedback.
Compensation and feedback should not be lumped into one event.
If the company is giving individual bonuses they can and should be tied to tangible outcomes anyway or it's just going to be a source of even more office politicking (i mean it's inescapable either way but it's a more vs less thing).