Kill the Annual Performance Review?

Jay Shepard’s Gruntled Employees post of 12/31/11 calls the Annual Employee Performance Reviews The Dumbest Managerial Tool Ever. He offers four compelling arguments for this point of view. They mostly center around the reviews not being done in an appropriate time frame – when praising or criticizing employees behavior, its best done when both you and the employee will remember the incident. We couldn’t agree more. Just remember to praise in public and criticize privately.

EOS suggests one more idea which you should find useful. Every manager should have a quarterly conversation with all their direct reports. This would go a long way towards avoiding the traps Jay talks about in his post.

What would you talk about quarterly? We suggest that the conversation should center on how well the employee is living the company values and how well they are doing their job. Both pieces are important.

Companies implementing EOS use a simple paper and pencil tool called the People Analyzer to provide feedback to employees on how well they are living the company values. You can download a free copy here.

The example shown in the graphic uses EOS Worldwide’s values and shows the simple idea of rating the employee a “+” if they demonstrate the value most of the time, a “-” if they almost never demonstrate it, and a “+/-” if its 50/50. The BAR is the minimum acceptable rating.

Its simple and direct. The first time you use it, you can compare how the employee rates themselves vs how you rate them. The gap is what the conversation is about. In later quarters you can focus on just one value and why it is important and how it plays into this employees role, etc.

Next week, I’ll write about the other half of the People Analyzer, called “GWC”, which provides simple feedback on how well the employee is doing their job.

Do you provide feedback on values in your company?