

Many managers end up using one of two methods to rank employees. Meanwhile, employees aren’t empowered to understand how they’re progressing throughout the year and make the appropriate shifts. They don’t progress organizational diversity efforts and can even hinder them. And because these reviews are subjective, they’re inherently biased. Making adjustments, adapting, and evolving is often a slow, difficult process. On a company level, these performance management issues limit organizations from being agile. So what positive business outcome are we getting from doing it this way? The results of traditional performance managementĬonsider the high-level impact of performance reviews. The mechanics of the system are broken: Reviews don’t offer employees a consistent understanding of their career growth process, nor do they supply context around expectations.

Suddenly, elbows start rubbing, and a heavy wave of politics stifles authenticity. If you’ve gone through the process, you understand how behavior changes during performance review season. While all other areas of our businesses have benefited from innovation and technology to make us more agile, nimble, and high-performing, we stick to our paradigm of performance “managing” people. It’s easy to brush off the notion that employees widely dislike performance reviews and see them as a regrettable necessity, but it's not only employees who suffer from this process. This thwarts much of the great work companies do to progress diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in their organizations. Plus, the review infrequency-once or twice a year-doesn’t offer a continual feedback loop to help guide employee growth and results in a number of unconscious biases creeping into the process. Since they lack clear performance benchmarks or criteria, reviews are highly subjective. These dreaded evaluations are how most companies measure and evaluate employee performance-and where the main issues with performance management start.īeing that our paradigm for measuring employee performance is top-down, it’s no surprise performance reviews follow the waterfall methodology and are, by design, linear and sequential. Performance management today: a flawed systemĪs it is today, we can’t talk about performance without talking about performance reviews. Here’s where the paradigm needs to shift in order to support employees today and in the future. But employees don’t join your organization to have their performance “managed”-they join to progress their career. “Performance management” is arguably one of your most critical people programs, given that it’s the process that employees associate with their growth, development, learning, income, and progression within your organization. The “old ways” are simply not acceptable, scalable, or even feasible anymore. The rapid transition to remote work, along with new expectations from employees, means the power dynamics continue to shift. This new era of work means major changes for the enterprise. Despite the obvious flaws in many established practices, companies are reluctant to change-”the way it’s always been done” seems less disruptive and probably feels safer to those leaders who like or benefit from the status quo.īut the pandemic has ushered in a wave of disruption, with employees and company leaders re-evaluating everything from the purpose of work to the definition of the workplace itself. Performance management is a process that hasn’t seen much innovation over the decades.
