Editor’s Note: As I wind up my tenure as Editor of TLNT — I’m leaving at the end of March — I wanted to share some of my favorite TLNT posts. Here’s one from September 2011.
I’ve never been much of a fan for the performance review process
I’m with people like Dr. John Sullivan, who says that it is the one HR process that “everyone universally hates — employees hate it … managers hate doing it … and HR hates processing (them).” He feels that the problem is that reviews focus almost entirely on employee traits and not really on performance.
Or, there’s UCLA business professor Sam Culbert, who says about reviews that, “First, they’re dishonest and fraudulent. And second, they’re just plain bad management.”
Younger workers want instant feedback
And there’s a lesser expert who declared, “I am not a fan of the annual review process, mainly because of the focus on the ‘process.’ The discussion with the employee isn’t the problem, but rather, what you must go through to get to that stage — the inflexible forms, the manual process, and the lack of a good follow-up system that makes the evaluation truly meaningful.”