The Problem with Performance Reviews
how to crush an employee in seven steps
Once a year businesses across the land take part in a ritual called the Performance Review. It’s a huge opportunity, but unfortunately, implemented poorly far more often than not.
Here are Seven Steps to do a performance review that will leave your employees crying - and a few tips to avoid that if you prefer.
1. Set up the Performance Review Meeting
It’s Monday, and your employee sees an invitation from you on their calendar for your yearly performance review on Friday. They knew it was coming, but didn’t know when. Your employee just took a nosedive into anxiety. For many, the title of the meeting alone causes anxiety, worry, and an unnecessary planning in an attempt to prove yourself.
2. Ignore All Questions
Your employee will undoubtedly have a lot of questions about what to expect and what you want. Do your best to ignore those questions, but if forced to respond, be ambiguous and brief. If they ask what they need to prepare, either point them to a standard form, or tell them to “prepare talking points”.
3. Don’t Prepare
As a manager, you’re pretty busy, so just show up to the Performance Review and wing it. It’s up to the employee to tell you what they’ve done, and your job is to tell them how to do it better and faster. If you get in a pinch, feel free to make stuff up. It’s your word against them, and they’re probably not going to complain anyway.
4. Only Give Feedback in the Perf Review
The Performance Review is the only opportunity you have to give feedback, so give a lot of it. That time they were late to a meeting 8 months ago - now is a great time to bring it up and ask for improvement.
5. Talk as Much as Possible
In order to take some stress of your employee, take a lot of time in the Performance Review to talk about what you’ve done. Tell them how you’ve helped them, tell them what you would do if you were them, and give them a break by filling every moment with your voice. This is also an opportunity for you to take credit for any work they did that made you look good.
6. Do Not Talk About Career Growth
This is a performance review. It looks backwards at performance and not into the future. Avoid any conversations about what sort of “opportunities” may be available, or what their career plans may be. Career growth “just happens organically”, and wasting time on it during a meeting is dumb.
7. Do Not Ask for Feedback
Ideally, you will run out of time while you’re micromanaging or talking about yourself, but if you find extra time in the meeting, just end the meeting. Asking for feedback on what you can do as a manager doesn’t make sense when it’s their performance review. Give them an onslaught of feedback, pat them on the head, and send them back to work. The best news is now you don’t have to do this for another year.
The Sad Part - and a Better Way
The list above is absurd, but we all have experienced at least some of these. Some people may have experienced them all. It’s horrid, it’s awful, and it’s embarrassing. I just read a report this week stating that research shows that yearly performance reviews generally aren’t effective, and that less than 20% of employees feel inspired by their review.
But it can be better.
What’s in a Name
First off, get rid of the name Performance Review. I like to call it a Career Discussion instead. It’s much less of a review of their work as it is a reflection of what they’ve done, and a discussion on where they want to go. It probably doesn’t matter what you call it, as long as the discussion focuses on reflection and growth, but IME, any less anxiety inducing name is a big benefit.
Normalize Feedback
While it sounded absurd above (I hope?), do not save all of your feedback for a yearly meeting. Feedback has a short half-life, so give feedback as close to the event where it happens as you can. I have half an article written on feedback for a future post where I reserve the right to copy that last sentence. Just give feedback more.
In fact, normalize the performance review. Your company may only require one performance review a year, but if you care about employee growth and engagement, I suggeest having a “Career Discussion” three or four times a year. You’re already having regular 1:1s, so just take one a quarter to focus on a deeper career reflection. Your employees are going to do better work, and you’ll take the stress off of the once a year evaluation process.
Be a Coach
Ask questions, listen more, and talk less. If your employee says they want to do X, rather than tell a story about the time you did X, shut the hell up and just ask them, “tell me more about why that’s interesting to you”. Then listen. Sometimes, they don’t actually want to do X, but they think doing X will enable them to do Y. Then you can talk about why, Y.
In The Alliance, Reid Hoffman talks about a partnership between employee and manager that rings true to me. As an employee, I do things that help me grow and learn that support my manager’s success. In turn, my managers give me opportunities and coaching to do those things better. The autonomous nature of knowledge work fits really well with this sort of reciprocal relationship.
Hoffman’s book introduces the concept of a "tour of duty," where an employee commits to meeting specific goals within a certain time frame (with the managers support). When that “tour” ends, they can do another tour, or go their separate ways. A lot of times, the best role for a growing employee may be in another team, org, or company. Good managers help employees find their next tour.
Hoffman talks about performance reviews as a checkpoint to discuss the tour’s progress, adjust as needed, and re-clarify mutual expectations. This concept makes the review more of a collaborative dialogue rather than a one-sided assessment.
No Surprises
In my very last (and last for a reason) performance review at Microsoft, my manager flat-out made up stuff that I didn’t do. Those things I didn’t do only meant that I got “average” rewards instead of something more, but it still felt gross.
I can also recall several times when my review included what was actually good feedback - just about things that I had never heard about before - and had really no opportunity to learn from. Uggh.
But most importatnly, absolutely nothing in the performance review/career discussion should be *new*. The career discussion is an opportunity to reflect on some points that have already been discussed and try to find patterns or new insights. It’s not a time to reveal new information or give non-actionable feedback. Take it seriously.
In the End
If you read these silly articles regularly, you know that I believe that you focus on building an engaged team first, becuase strong delivery and performance is then inevitable. So to that end, consider stats on employee engagement.
Employees are 3x more engaged when they receive daily feedback from their managers vs. annual feedback.
43% of highly engaged employees receive feedback at least once a week1.
As a manager during perf review season, you have a choice. You can use it to crush dreams, disengage your employees and drop productivity - or you can take it seriously and help your org learn and grow.
You do You
-A 31:0
https://blog.clearcompany.com/mind-blowing-statistics-performance-reviews-employee-engagement
Your suggestions for a “Better Way” makes sense, and I wish more companies would adopt it.
Reviews every quarter are great, watching and celebrating your colleagues getting promoted every 6, 9, or 12 months in a company that has enough growth room to do that really changes your attitude about how you work. My early days at Salesforce were like this.
Here's a few more tips
* Take advantage of your new hires out of college
- They are new to the review process and may not be mentored on what’s expected so you don’t even have to give them the whole review. Give them half of it, the bit saying how great they are then make them sign it and if they come back a few weeks later with a slight paystub change give them the other half of the review if they start asking questions.
* Take advantage of your H1-B employees
- Did you know you can treat H1-B employees as second class citizens? See which country they originated from before you screw them over in the review because some of them may come from a more privileged country, be quite happy to return and will not sign the evaluation you’ve given them.
* Don’t tailor your feed back (See 3. Don't prepare)
- CTRL-C, CTRL-V is great tool. Make sure you’ve delivered your evaluation of the employee you don’t value or respect in such a way that the employee will be too embarrassed to talk about it to anyone. Make sure on a Friday afternoon. Cut and paste for the rest of the employees you don’t value and hope they don’t talk to each other.
Like you mentioned, many of us had to deal with some or all of the issues you mentioned. I will say there are some groups that experience this more frequently than others for no reason related to poor performance. Some of us got so traumatized on our first review we said never again. I feel this is why you have people not signing review evaluations, or always going to review meetings with 2 offers from other companies, or negotiating review scores before the managers go fight for you in the stack ranking.
When I got my first management job, it came with management training that included performance reviews. It was all about protecting the company's ass by keeping a documented paper trail and how to meet the required rating distribution.
Needless to say, my first year giving reviews did not go well. There was a corporate process I had to implement, but I had a lot more freedom on how to implement that process than I was taught.
I remember thinking "How would I implement this process if I actually cared about the employees and their career development?" I came up with a list much like yours in this article.
It's still a consequential discussion, and you can't remove all the anxiety, but thanks for sharing the better way!