- Let's talk about one of HR's favorite activities,
annual performance reviews.
And I say that sort of tongue-in-cheek,
because I can't think of a single person
who just loves annual performance reviews.
They're a pain
because you got to gather all this
information from everybody,
write down all the things,
try to remember what actually has happened
over the past year,
and the feedback is usually not that helpful.
And then, you're making people's career decisions
around promotions and compensation based on that.
This is fundamentally broken.
There's got to be a better way.
And I think in many ways when you tease apart
why we do it this way,
it's because they are difficult to do
so we try to avoid doing it to the
shortest amount of pain possible
which is once a year.
Seems like the logical way to do it.
But we, as humans, crave feedback continuously,
because we want to know are we doing a good job,
should we be doing a different job,
how can we be better?
So, I think in many ways HR needs to be thinking about
getting rid of the annual performance review.
And you can do that because digital channels
can allow you to collect the information,
to write up the reviews,
to give feedback in a much more continuous way.
Let's take for example, imagine that you didn't
have any annual performance feedback.
You didn't have any quarterly reviews even.
You just had feedback on a constant drip every single day.
The question then becomes why would you need
a quarterly review or annual review?
So, how could you get that feedback?
Could be through people giving feedback,
kudos that you're doing a great job.
Just writing to you saying,
hey this is a different way I think you could've done this,
and having the culture in place to be able
to take that feedback.
Now, the reality is most organizations
don't do this very well.
And I think, again, it's about the way
that we understand and use digital channels
as a communication and relationship-building tool.
We don't trust it.
We don't feel like we can really have our say
and be honest and look in each other's eyes
and be able to give that feedback 'cause it's digital.
I can't reach out and shake your hand
and see your body language.
So, this is a competency, I think that
the top organizations have figured out.
How do I use digital channels to give feedback?
And then, therefore, because feedback is done
on a more regular basis,
how I can shrink that review cycle
from 12 months to six months to three months
to every two weeks to it going away.
This does not remove the need to look at compensation
on a regular basis,
but it does this wonderful healthy thing
for the organization.
It separates feedback from compensation decisions.
And every single study that's out there
says that's healthy for an organization.
Because if you tie feedback to compensation
nobody will give true feedback.
So, I'm pretty passionate about this, as you can see.
Around how HR needs to think strategically
about this thing called performance reviews,
and to also think about how digital can help
your organization give better feedback in general.
And then, that will then allow you to just couple
performance, development, and compensation
into a much healthier relationship with your employees.