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Now Reading | The Push Against Performance Reviews
Performance reviews have been hated from the dawn of time. According to the author, job ratings were used (and criticized) in China as early as the third century; in the early eighteen-hundreds, an owner of cotton mills in Scotland hung color-coded wooden blocks over employees’ workstations to indicate their merit.
Is it time to do away with traditional performance reviews? Accenture thinks so. The NYT reports that on Tuesday, Accenture, an emblem of traditional corporate culture if ever there was one, announced that it is getting rid of annual evaluations for its three hundred and thirty thousand employees, replacing the process with a system where managers will give feedback on a more regular basis. Accenture’s C.E.O., Pierre Nanterme, told the Washington Post that the existing evaluations are cumbersome and expensive. Plus, he added, “the outcome is not great.” Deloitte also recently changed up their often costly and ineffective model for a friendlier and more streamlined process.
“Data shows that all kinds of personal quirks and biases, both conscious and not, influence our appraisals of other people. These prejudices, which are sometimes collectively referred to as “the idiosyncratic rater effect,” influence how managers think about—and describe—their employees. Studies suggest that more than half of a given performance rating has to do with the traits of the person conducting the evaluation, not of the person being rated.”
The article goes on to say that Kevin Murphy, a scientist at Colorado State University and an expert on performance appraisals, points out other issues: Managers have incentives to inflate appraisals; even accurate feedback can feel biased and unfair, making people less motivated and hurting relationships between supervisors and subordinates; and organizations don’t do a good job of rewarding good evaluators and sanctioning bad ones. “As a result, annual appraisals end up as a source of anxiety and annoyance rather than a source of useful information,” Murphy wrote.
Has your company had success with your performance review process? I would love to know.
You can read the entire article here: http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-push-against-performance-reviews?mbid=nl_072515Daily&CNDID=18262367&mbid=nl_072515Daily&CNDID=18262367&spMailingID=7932785&spUserID=MjQ0MTcwMjQwNzkS1&spJobID=723256881&spReportId=NzIzMjU2ODgxS0
