Recognize This! – The 5 top drivers of stress in the annual performance appraisal process are easily overcome through crowdsourcing with social recognition.
Why does the traditional annual performance review continue to fail as both a performance measurement and management device? There are a litany of reasons but by far the greatest, most overriding reason for the failure of the annual review to accomplish stated goals is this:
It’s Stressful!
Or, as Steve Roesler put it in his “All Things Workplace” blog:
“Managers add stress to their lives by postponing important conversations and letting them build up until their heads start to feel like a balloon waiting to burst. Or, we try to submerge those thoughts until we discover that they tend to pop out in strange and often harmful ways. How many times have we received–or given–a terse comment that really was the result of some long- unspoken feeling?”
If that doesn’t resonate with you, how about this assessment of performance assessments from Denis Wilson in Fast Company:
“Let’s cut to the chase: If the only feedback your employees get from you is in the form of a 6- or 12-month performance review, it’s time to change your approach to feedback. Dropping bombs on employees once or twice a year only serves to build up pressure and make feedback sessions feel like indictments. And most importantly, it does little to alter behavior and improve performance and productivity, which should be your goal.”
Why Is the Annual Review Stressful?
That’s easy, though the list is quite long. Below are just five of the top drivers of stress in the annual performance appraisal process:
- Managers don’t want to do it.
- Employees don’t want to receive it.
- HR dreads the nagging involved to get it done.
- The results are notoriously skewed, biased or flat-out wrong.
- A once-a-year check-in on progress, goals, behaviors and outcomes is less than useless.
Some would call these five statements my opinion. I don’t. I’ve read too much research and interacted with too many professionals up and down the chain. These statements are fact – for the traditional annual review process, anyway.
But you can bust the myths of performance management (seven of them by Dr. Pietro Micheli’s count, and he’s a professor at Warwick Business School). How? It’s fairly simple. Put the performance review into everyone’s hands, every day with strategic, social employee recognition.
I’d explain what I mean more fully here, but my CEO, Eric Mosley did a much better job in his new book The Crowdsourced Performance Review: How Social Recognition Transforms Performance Management. It’s a quick read, packed full of steps you can take to make performance feedback relevant for the modern business world.
What do you hate the most about the annual review process?
Tags: 360 degree review, annual performance appraisal, annual performance review, crowdsource performance review, employee recognition and rewards, social recognition, strategic recognition
Some people would argue for doing away with performance reviews, but how does anyone know where they stand if there’s no mechanism in place to tell them? At Infusionsoft, most managers try to have 1-on-1 meetings with individual team members at least once a month and performance reviews are done quarterly. Our philosophy is that nothing that comes up in the review should be a surprise because the employee and his manager are in constant communication.
Kimberlee, that is a far better approach, indeed, than at most organizations. One thing still of concern (from my vantage point of little knowledge on your system), is that the manager is still the primary source of feedback and therefore a single point of failure in the system. Think of all the additional data and feedback that could be generated by allowing peers to share their very detailed and specific praise, then including that in the 1:1 meetings and quarterly reviews. The manager is likely to learn of areas of strength their own employees have that they may not have been aware of.