Recently, a former Fortune 500 Human Resources Director was interviewed about employee performance reviews.
Her advice: Do away with them.
Her view was that it’s unrealistic to ask managers meaningfully to evaluate employees on a broad range of skills over a specified time period on some arbitrary schedule. Her suggestion: give meaningful, specific feedback at the time it is warranted. This is good advice for employers who may be called to defend their employment practices.
A generic, non-specific review may either gloss over serious performance issues or appear unduly harsh and unfair by conflating those issues in a single review.
The bottom line: don’t use employee reviews reflexively. Think about why you need them, and make sure they are adapted to serve that purpose.