Another big issue with performance reviews is how heavily biased they are to recency. People know not to rock the boat when performance reviews are coming up be

Another big issue with performance reviews is how heavily biased they are to recency. People know not to rock the boat when performance reviews are coming up because a bad review will be used against you when layoffs start. Like the author says, performance reviews between co-workers can be unanimously positive because everybody who gets how the game works knows that any negative thing can be construed as a black mark. Co-workers are the only ones who actually know whether or not somebody is doing their job, doubly so if the employees have overlapping responsibilities. Day shift knows when night shift hasn't cleaned or prepped, and visa versa. A better approach than reviews would be a system of communication between night shift and day shift about what responsibilities are expected before handing off the shift. It's key that both sides feel like the responsibilities are fairly distributed. Disagreements may happen and some people may dig their heels in, so mediation can be helpful. What about performance evaluation? That's a made up corporate phrase to justify layoffs. We all went to school. In every group project there was one, or maybe more people that did no work. How does a teacher know which student did the work, and which ones didn't? Answer: They don't. Everybody has experienced this. The freeloaders get off scott free, because the teacher is not in a good vantage point to see the effort. Asking students to rank each other is also unhelpful because the freeloaders could outnumber the ones who actually do work. There is one foolproof method to spot freeloaders from those who actually do the work. The ones that are capable of doing the work can do most, if not all of the work themselves. After all, they had to since they were surrounded by freeloaders.