How Do You Really Feel About Performance Reviews?
Almost every company, big or small, private or public, loves to conduct performance reviews for their employees. The goal of these assessments is to come to an unbiased, merit-based determination of how well the employee has performed their job.
Everything that a worker did in the past 12 months is neatly wrapped up in a score that tells the business whether they overperformed, met expectations, or underperformed. From here, rewards – and punishments – are meted out.
For many companies, performance reviews are a way to create a paper trail in case the company wants to get rid of an employee in the future. At companies with toxic work cultures, performance reviews are used as a political weapon of control wielded by HR and managers.
A formal way to ask for more
Most companies pitch the performance review as a conversation. The manager and their direct report can talk about where the employee is doing well and where they need to develop or grow their skills. Performance reviews are the main way, and perhaps the only way, that HR departments know how to assess whether an employee is “good” or “bad” at scale.
Whatever feedback comes from these meetings is gospel. There’s no arguing with a completed performance review and the whole conversation idea no longer applies. If your score is low and you’re put onto a performance improvement plan, deal with it.
Managers can also be put into a tough spot when they’re required to find areas for improvement, even if an employee is nailing their job responsibilities. They meet deadlines, they work well in a team, and they’re responsible. But there’s always room for improvement, according to HR.
They should be more willing to take on extra work. Or stay later in the office. Or speak up more during meetings. Sometimes it can feel like your personality is being criticized which is very anxiety inducing, at least for me. As much as we may try, we can’t just simply fix all of our personality flaws and be perfect “corporate citizens.”
Finally, when all of the performance reviews for the year are completed, they sit on a shelf collecting dust forever. Usually, it's because managers are given vague or burdensome pointers on how to follow up. No manager wants to track how often their employee raises their hand to speak in meetings. Any follow up falls away in the face of more pressing concerns for both managers and employees.
Scoring employees from 1 to 5
Most performance review methods rely, at least partially, on a scoring system, because it appears to be the most objective way to measure and compare employees against their peers. Employees can be measured on a scale of 1 (unacceptable) to 5 (far exceeds expectations) for all kinds of things like their ability to work on a team, meet deadlines, or “go above and beyond” the responsibilities of their role.
Scoring systems are far more up to interpretation than HR professionals would like us to believe. Logically, if everyone is rated on the same criteria, there shouldn’t be any bias. But since these criteria include things like perceived behaviors, traits, and competencies, personal opinions will come into play.
For example, if teamwork is one of the criteria, does that mean that an employee must be available to help when their colleagues need it? Or does it mean that the employee should be proactively taking on additional tasks, mentoring new hires, or teaching the team new skills? Each manager will view this criteria differently.
A rating system may look like this:
1 – Never meets expectations
2 – Sometimes meets expectations
3 – Meets expectations
4 – Exceeds expectations
5 – Goes above and beyond expectations
But managers and HR might treat a score of 3 as not good enough. Or conversely, the company may instruct managers to be stingy in giving a 5 rating. It’s a moving goal post that can be stressful for employees who never know what to expect.
Forced curve ranking
A harsh form of performance reviews is starting to make a comeback in corporate workplaces. It’s the forced curve or stack ranked review. In this model, no matter how great your team is, someone has to be ranked poorly because that’s how stacked ranking works.
Let’s say you manage a team of sales reps. Overall, your team outperforms other sales teams. Everyone achieves at least 90% of their sales target or higher. A few even make it to the annual sales club. As a manager, you still have to put one of their employees in the bottom 10%. Ouch.
Managers can also bring in their own personal biases when stack ranking. If everyone on the team is performing well, or at least similarly, the manager may ding the rep that they just don’t like as much or have a personality conflict with. This person's career at this company is now held back by a poor performance review, and for what? Simply because the system dictates it.
What are the consequences and rewards in a forced ranking system? Perhaps only 10-15% of employees can be labeled as high performers and they receive the biggest raises. Other employees, who may be completing their job responsibilities entirely sufficiently, will receive smaller raises. Finally, the bottom 10% may be put on a performance plan or let go even if they’re fulfilling their job responsibilities.
Is this really the best way to get the most out of your workforce?
If you have a team of great employees, punishing some for being slightly less great is demoralizing and an unethical way to treat hard working people. It also takes away any incentive to work as a team since your job is on the line if your colleagues succeed.
No one should receive a 4% raise versus an 8% raise simply because the manager was forced to find something to critique. And a company lucky enough to be full of decent employees should be doing everything it can to retain those workers, not ranking them so that some employees feel worthless for not being excellent enough.
There’s always a bias
Managers are still humans. We can and should host manager training to remove bias from decision making but at the end of the day, we all make choices that aren’t completely objective, whether we realize it or not. Performance reviews that have the “open box” field where managers can fill in information like “areas for improvement” are rife with gendered assessments.
According to Harvard Business Review, women frequently receive vague feedback that offers little guidance on what can be improved upon and is usually centered around personality and communication styles. For men, feedback tends to be longer, focused on technical skills, and provides more direction for advancement. Basically, more care is put into giving a man feedback than giving a woman feedback.
Another problem is that performance reviews usually only happen once a year. Managers are expected to fill in (and remember) information about everything the employee accomplished in the last year. Silent achievers in the organization may not hold real estate in their manager’s memory, especially compared to others who are more vocal about their successes.
Finally, managers won’t all value the scoring criteria the same way. If a company ranks employees based on company wide “mission and values” like integrity, innovation, community, or other vague terms, who’s to say that managers will care about each of these values equally? A manager may have far too high of expectations for community and low expectations for innovation.
Did they do the job? If yes, then they performed well.
Is it too simplistic to ask, “did you do the tasks that we hired you to do?” and give an employee a top rating if the answer is yes? Maybe, but the way we do things today, performance reviews can easily devolve into a political personality contest or even just a reward system for those that work more unpaid hours.
Performance reviews aren’t inherently bad and we shouldn’t stop searching for the most fair way to assess an employee's readiness for a promotion. But if your company uses performance reviews as a way to identify and punish employees who simply do their job and then go home, it’s not really about performance. It’s about control.