Improving the Dreaded Performance Review
As a Dr. Deming disciple, I’m of the opinion that performance reviews do more harm than good when it comes to motivating your employees. Within my companies, we’ve recently discarded the practice entirely. But, if you and your management team still work with yearly reviews, maybe Stephen Mihm’s article for Bloomberg View can inspire a few changes, or, like us, put the nail firmly in the coffin lid of your opinion against them. Read my top points from his piece.
- Some companies view performance reviews as a “necessary evil,” but leading names are moving away from these older systems of assessment
- Instead, they are making changes by introducing qualitative assessments by favoring adjectives such as “Outstanding [or] Needs Improvement”
- Since 1915, experts have tried to adjust the measurement techniques, Walter Dill Scott being a leader of the trend, but inherently the scales fail to inspire employees to make improvements year to year