Why everyone hates performance reviews
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Performance review. Two words in office life that are often guaranteed to make employees and managers alike roll their eyes in and sigh loudly.
Everyone hates performance review season, and I mean everyone.
As a formal process of evaluating an employee’s value to a business, the performance review (PR) has been around for a few decades now and yet with each passing year I read exactly the same articles and books lamenting its shortcomings.
Which begs the question: if, after 25 years and hundreds of thousands of companies administering millions of reviews, we’re still complaining about the same problems, does that mean the problems can’t be solved?
Because surely to goodness, after all this time and all this practice, if there was a way of solving those problems, wouldn’t someone have found it by now?
I think the answer to those questions are Yes and Yes.
Yes, I think the fundamental problems with the PR process can’t be solved, and yes, if there was a way of solving them, someone would have found it.
The reason, I think, is that in order to remove the inherent objection to the PR process you have to change human nature, because as humans we’re genetically engineered to dislike everything that a review asks us to do.
As employees, we hate having our shortcomings pointed out to us – and we particularly hate having those shortcomings logged on a document that is in some way used to determine our relative value to the organisation we work for.
As managers, we hate giving negative feedback, because as a species we naturally lean to collaborative support and encouragement (and all right, yes, I also know that there are exceptions to that rule, too)
And HR teams hate PR because it’s often a nightmare to administer and manage.
So, if we all hate receiving negative feedback (no matter how constructively it might be framed) and we all hate giving negative feedback, and we all agree that those problems are close to impossible to solve, where do we go from here?
Performance review as a human process
I think the answer to that question lies in humanising the process rather than in altering its purpose.
In the end, most of us would agree that business and the people who inhabit them need to have some sort of process to ensure:
· Employees are managed in a way that is equitable (all people are treated fairly and even-handedly)
· identifies areas for improvement on both sides (what I can do better as an employee and what I can do better as a manager)
· celebrates success
· identifies opportunities for future growth through development and training
Because this is serious stuff that speaks to important subjects like career development, leadership, productivity, culture and profitability, business has tended to take a serious approach to it. And by serious, I mean formal.
There are forms. There’s a timetable. There’s a formal interview (positively the worst thing about the whole shooting match). And there’s a formal sign-off process that confirms everyone took part and the summary of the meeting is accurate – which is different to everyone agreeing with the feedback they received.
It’s a starched process that often feels artificial and totally at odds with the naturally-occurring relationships in the workplace that are often rooted in humour, informality and goodwill.
As a result, we all tend to rail against it – regardless of what side of the employee-manager-HR triangle we sit on.
If we want to see an improvement in the quality of an individual performance review, then we need to solve the problem of stiff formality and process.
Invest in the process
One of the reasons why we hate giving and receiving feedback at a PR is because it often comes in one big download, with no warning.
What does that mean? It means that suddenly the employee is facing problems they didn’t necessarily know were problems and is being asked to explain context for them on the fly with no preparation. It means the manager knows they are going to be giving negative feedback that the employee might be completely unaware of.
The answer here is to commit teams to a process of ongoing feedback, where that feedback is delivered in a more informal way. If we give and receive good and not so good feedback on an ongoing basis, it becomes an expected part of our daily working life.
That has a number of benefits. It allows the manager to raise an issue in a way that is gentler and perceived to be less confrontational. It allows the employee to hear the feedback and adjust their behaviour or output accordingly. And it helps all of us get comfortable with the experience of feedback.
Done well, that should equate to no surprises at a more structured conversation at year-end and gives everyone every chance of solving problems and turning potentially negative feedback into positive celebration.
Simplify it
It’s not unusual for a PR form to run to several pages. Those forms are completed individually by both manager and employee and then discussed at the ‘formal’ meeting. They’re time-consuming and often written in well-intended HR-speak that fails to elicit the information each party really needs.
By identifying the information we really need to capture and filtering it into a page or two of easy-to-understand questions or categories, everyone is likely to get far more out of the process – and spend far less time completing it and then resenting it.
It’s unrealistic to think we can make people love performance review – but we can at least make it painless.
If you’d like to find out more about how Constantia Consulting can help your HR team or business develop a better, more effective and more efficient performance review process, please get in touch for an informal chat.
