5 ms·

Employee Performance Reviews Do More Harm Than Good

30 points by hillel 17y ago

TallGuyShort 17y ago
I don't think this is necessarily true. I realize most employers aren't like this, but my boss does a very good job of politely and clearly telling me what he expects of me and what I can expect from him. Our performance reviews are always positive experiences, and I leave with specific goals to accomplish before the next review: sometimes goals to improve my job performance, sometimes goals to improve myself. Instead of focussing just on a bonus or pay increase, it's basically a reconciliation of "what would you like from us", and "what we would like from you". I think if more employers looked at it this way, and were more casual and open about the whole process, it would be a lot more beneficial to their companies.
- noodle 17y ago
  i don't necesasrily disagree with you here, but i think that the process would be better if it were a rolling review with constant feedback and dialog, instead of something built up as an important once-a-year event.
  - Retric 17y ago
    Rolling feedback should be part of the annual review process at any competent company. Where I work the annual review looks at those above, below, and beside you and doing that several times a year is far to time consuming. IMO, the trick is managing the less formal feedback and using that as part of the formal review. Which is why your manager does not create your review. They might be biased by something from last week but your coworkers tend to think back to the important projects over the year.
  - TallGuyShort 17y ago
    Oh I agree with that - it's important to cultivate an environment where constructive feedback is constantly being exchanged. That's hard to do - but when it happens, it makes a big difference.
- hillel 17y ago
  Constant honest and open feedback is always a good thing. My point is that performance reviews are often used as a substitute for constant honest and open feedback. And as such, they are a failure.
bonsaitree 17y ago
Unfortunately, at least in the U.S., unless there's some kind of formal & documented evaluation process for compensation, they're opening themselves up to a whole host of potential lawsuits. One useful strategy we've had is to do 90 day (quarterly) quickie evaluations followed by a formal, but succinct, annual review. If both parties are doing their jobs, "pathway/goal" guidance given informally during the quarterly process and throughout the year should lead to very little surprises in the annual review.
- dreamz 17y ago
  Also performance review depends upon the corporate culture but then the bigger you are the diluted culture you have ... At the same time you can use performance review to your own advantage, how? well you can easily identify whether your manager is just a good manager or GREAT manager - Good managers help their employees succeed in whatever role they happen to be in. Great managers see the unique talents of each employee, and then create the role that's a perfect vehicle for those talents. Great managers remove the obstacles that prevent their employees from unleashing their talent. And they make sure each employee has the right opportunities, the right stage, the right audience, to be fully appreciated.
RobertL 17y ago
Couple of decades ago I worked on a team for a major corporation (Rockwell Int.). The objective of the team was to develop the ultimate performance evaluation form (e.g. program... you can't design a form like that without defining the program also). The result was a 7 page monstrosity that I have been totally embarrassed about ever since. I ended up resigning and moving to another company because I didn't want to have to use the thing to evaluate my employees. I think the best evaluation I've ever seen was the one the character in the movie "Office Space" gave himself. You know, the one where he describes what he does and ultimately concludes that he really only does about 15 minutes of productive work every week. I think about this every time I peek into a cubicle and see one of the other developers "hard at work" watching stuff on U-Tube.
andygeers 17y ago
Presumably the author here is drawing a distinction between performance reviews and development reviews? It seems like it's quite a good thing to review how a developer is getting on regularly, and find out what things they'd like to do more of and how they could develop their skills, without it being tied to bonus distribution.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
PaulMorgan 17y ago
I once worked with a manager who was very up front about using performance reviews to retaliate against any subordinate who crossed her. Luckily she wasn't my boss.
- gaius 17y ago
  Your boss was merely more subtle about it.
kolya3 17y ago
What blows my mind is that no company I have worked at has ever set performance goals on day 1. It doesn't make sense. We set goals at annual reviews so why not on day 1? Why blindside an employee during the first annual review? I talk to everyone on my team 3 times a year to make sure I'm giving them what they need from me and vice versa. The informal manner helps in keeping the whole process relaxed and the feedback genuine. The 4 month period in between gives ample time to improve things without stretching it out for a whole year. Iterate, get feedback, iterate, get feedback. It works for startup business plans so why wouldn't it work for self development?
joshhart 17y ago
This article feels like it was taken out of 7 Habits - Think Win/Win. Recurring performance reviews certainly cause unnecessary competition and fear among employees, breaking up their "team" ability. I just wish the article had addressed the deeper question of how to tell an employee they're doing poorly without such a review.
- hillel 17y ago
  I'm planning a follow-up post on that topic. :)
jdrock 17y ago
My girlfriend is a Ph.D. student in industrial organizational psychology. She had this to say: I think this view is unnecessarily extreme. I think the correct way it should have been presented is that performance reviews should be done in a more useful way. Not all performance reviews are for the purpose of rationalizing bonuses. I think feedback on one's performance accompanied with goal setting of specific behaviors is fundamental in sustaining good work and motivation in employees. I do think that ranking employees doesn't work most of the time because it not only creates competition but discourages those who have been performing well, but just not so much as others who could potentially be ass-kissers as what the article says. The bottom line is that , w/o a review/feedback on your on-going performance, you wouldn't have an idea of what you should work towards to and u cant assume that all employees are intrinsically motivated to do better. Heuristically, people lose their sense of engagement about 5 months after they are hired and this can keep deteriorating if immediate supervisors don't provide the support/encouragement/feedback. One last thing, research has repeatedly shown that regular performance feedback increases motivation and performance in the long-run. what's important really is how the feedback is given.
- hillel 17y ago
  I generally agree with your girlfriend. And to be clear, I never said that regular consistent performance feedback was bad. I said that the annual performance review was not a substitute for it.
ironkeith 17y ago
In my experience employee reviews are typically de-motivational. My employer has me rate my team members on a scale from 1 to 6 on a variety of work related criteria. The basis for getting a raise rests on the employees ability to increase their ratings on a review to review period. It's horrible (and I've told them I think so). The entire ratings system is ripe to be exploited by people who know how to play the game. This is especially bad if non-technical people are reviewing technical people. I had to witness the worst developer on my team become the highest paid because he knew how to sell himself and could speak a language that upper management understood. I'm more in favor of (arguably) less subjective methods of determining an employees worth (like Bioware's RPG style ratings, or Joel Spolsky's ladder). There's still room for person bias, but at least there's less room.
- paulreiners 17y ago
  > This is especially bad if non-technical people are reviewing technical people. Hear, hear. There is nothing more maddening than having someone dumber than you tell you that you're dumb once a year.
- Tamerlin 17y ago
  My situation is similar; the manager who decides on reviews for our "team" THINKS he's technical, but he's basically useless. He hinders communication between team members, reassigns people to projects arbitrarily and without warning, and has had a 100% attrition rate for his team since he joined it. No one, even folks on other teams, have had good experiences working with him, because the one thing that he does NOT do is work to remove barriers that we developers have to face in order to get our jobs done. (He creates far more barriers than he removes.) And yet HE is the one who evaluates OUR performance... making the entire process a waste of time. To top it off, he isn't even honest in his reviews... as far as I can tell it's all politics for him, basically doing anything he can to shift blame down from him onto us.
  - Silhouette 17y ago
    This is why everyone's review should include feedback from peers and, where applicable, subordinates. It's also a good argument for including discussions with your boss's boss in your review, to avoid a poor but politically savvy manager being able to competely filter feedback from everyone below them to the higher-ups who could do something about that poor manager in the middle.
cscott 17y ago
Employee performance reviews that enforce an arbitrary curve-based ranking or grading system often to do more harm than good. I have seen employees who have performed well all year get demolished by a performance review where they were rated a "3" or "4" out of "5" because HR required only one "5" per department and two or three "4"s, and expect the majority of employees to be a "3". (Thankfully, they didn't require that each department designate a "1" goat.) That being said, I have found that performance reviews that focus on how the employee has improved the business and seized opportunities (or not) and focus less on artificial competition are extremely beneficial.
- tom_b 17y ago
  +1 for mentioning the arbitrary curve-based ranking common in big companies. Tightly coupling salary/bonuses to performance reviews with this type of system is a disaster. Unfortunately, my experience is that most managers in such a system lack the insight to minimize the effect on employees. Maybe when you're talking about minimizing the effect of telling an employee they are (non-deservedly) one of the "3" performers, you've already lost the battle . . . Add in the inevitable weird corporate culture stuff "you are a '3' because you got promoted this year, it's just your turn in the box" and you have a perfect recipe for draining motivation away from employees.
mclin 17y ago
The last company I worked for had these '360' performance reviews where you get reviewed by a few coworkers as well as your boss. Also there was no money involved. I thought it worked really well. While you'd hope your coworkers would give you pointers on how you could improve throughout the year, realistically, shyer developers won't do that, and this gives them the opportunity to do so (mostly) anonymously.
sokoloff 17y ago
If you eliminate performance reviews altogether, and issues rewards as team rewards, why would top performers (the ones who might regularly bank 7-15% raises instead of 2-4% raises) stay with your company for the rock-steady, everyone-gets-5% return, when they can go somewhere else and make meaningfully more money? It seems that the socialist (not tarring, just naming) approach to granting team raises is a powerful attraction to low performers. In a small startup, with relatively little money to throw around, it probably doesn't matter and eliminating them may actually be a net win. Once the company reaches the 500+ person mark, failing to recognize ($$) individual achievement just demotivates and chases away those who would be your stars.
- Silhouette 17y ago
  But what is "individual achievement" in a field like software development? In the sort of teams one typically finds in those 500+ person organisations, nothing is truly done by individuals. Even if a genius developer produces a brilliant implementation of new feature quickly and with a low bug count, someone had the idea for that feature and worked out how it was going to integrate with other features, many people probably wrote a load of other code the feature depends on even if that code didn't itself create the same buzz, people were involved in testing the feature, producing the marketing, and on and on. While everyone might agree that the genius developer had done a good job for the team, how can you say quantitatively and objectively what his contribution was? 10%? 25%? 90%? In contrast, the success of a project team is generally fairly easy to quantify: divide the cost of running the team by the amount of revenue generated by the projects they produce. The sad reality is that while serious guru developers may indeed be an order of magnitude more productive than average, and some at the other end of the scale are actually counterproductive, salaries for employees will never realistically reflect this. The bottom-feeders always get more than they deserve, while the top guys will never get credit proportionate to their contribution. After all, this is why many of us get out and go freelance or start our own businesses. But within that reality, I can't help wondering whether the guys at the top would still rather work with a motivated team than be individually slightly better compensated but surrounding by jealous, bitter colleagues.
  - 17y ago

30 points by hillel 17y ago

I don't think this is necessarily true. I realize most employers aren't like this, but my boss does a very good job of politely and clearly telling me what he expects of me and what I can expect from him. Our performance reviews are always positive experiences, and I leave with specific goals to accomplish before the next review: sometimes goals to improve my job performance, sometimes goals to improve myself. Instead of focussing just on a bonus or pay increase, it's basically a reconciliation of "what would you like from us", and "what we would like from you". I think if more employers looked at it this way, and were more casual and open about the whole process, it would be a lot more beneficial to their companies.

noodle 17y ago
i don't necesasrily disagree with you here, but i think that the process would be better if it were a rolling review with constant feedback and dialog, instead of something built up as an important once-a-year event.
- Retric 17y ago
  Rolling feedback should be part of the annual review process at any competent company. Where I work the annual review looks at those above, below, and beside you and doing that several times a year is far to time consuming. IMO, the trick is managing the less formal feedback and using that as part of the formal review. Which is why your manager does not create your review. They might be biased by something from last week but your coworkers tend to think back to the important projects over the year.
- TallGuyShort 17y ago
  Oh I agree with that - it's important to cultivate an environment where constructive feedback is constantly being exchanged. That's hard to do - but when it happens, it makes a big difference.
hillel 17y ago
Constant honest and open feedback is always a good thing. My point is that performance reviews are often used as a substitute for constant honest and open feedback. And as such, they are a failure.

bonsaitree 17y ago

Unfortunately, at least in the U.S., unless there's some kind of formal & documented evaluation process for compensation, they're opening themselves up to a whole host of potential lawsuits. One useful strategy we've had is to do 90 day (quarterly) quickie evaluations followed by a formal, but succinct, annual review. If both parties are doing their jobs, "pathway/goal" guidance given informally during the quarterly process and throughout the year should lead to very little surprises in the annual review.

dreamz 17y ago
Also performance review depends upon the corporate culture but then the bigger you are the diluted culture you have ... At the same time you can use performance review to your own advantage, how? well you can easily identify whether your manager is just a good manager or GREAT manager - Good managers help their employees succeed in whatever role they happen to be in. Great managers see the unique talents of each employee, and then create the role that's a perfect vehicle for those talents. Great managers remove the obstacles that prevent their employees from unleashing their talent. And they make sure each employee has the right opportunities, the right stage, the right audience, to be fully appreciated.

RobertL 17y ago

Couple of decades ago I worked on a team for a major corporation (Rockwell Int.). The objective of the team was to develop the ultimate performance evaluation form (e.g. program... you can't design a form like that without defining the program also). The result was a 7 page monstrosity that I have been totally embarrassed about ever since. I ended up resigning and moving to another company because I didn't want to have to use the thing to evaluate my employees. I think the best evaluation I've ever seen was the one the character in the movie "Office Space" gave himself. You know, the one where he describes what he does and ultimately concludes that he really only does about 15 minutes of productive work every week. I think about this every time I peek into a cubicle and see one of the other developers "hard at work" watching stuff on U-Tube.

andygeers 17y ago

Presumably the author here is drawing a distinction between performance reviews and development reviews? It seems like it's quite a good thing to review how a developer is getting on regularly, and find out what things they'd like to do more of and how they could develop their skills, without it being tied to bonus distribution.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

PaulMorgan 17y ago

I once worked with a manager who was very up front about using performance reviews to retaliate against any subordinate who crossed her. Luckily she wasn't my boss.

gaius 17y ago
Your boss was merely more subtle about it.

kolya3 17y ago

What blows my mind is that no company I have worked at has ever set performance goals on day 1. It doesn't make sense. We set goals at annual reviews so why not on day 1? Why blindside an employee during the first annual review? I talk to everyone on my team 3 times a year to make sure I'm giving them what they need from me and vice versa. The informal manner helps in keeping the whole process relaxed and the feedback genuine. The 4 month period in between gives ample time to improve things without stretching it out for a whole year. Iterate, get feedback, iterate, get feedback. It works for startup business plans so why wouldn't it work for self development?

joshhart 17y ago

This article feels like it was taken out of 7 Habits - Think Win/Win. Recurring performance reviews certainly cause unnecessary competition and fear among employees, breaking up their "team" ability. I just wish the article had addressed the deeper question of how to tell an employee they're doing poorly without such a review.

hillel 17y ago
I'm planning a follow-up post on that topic. :)

jdrock 17y ago

My girlfriend is a Ph.D. student in industrial organizational psychology. She had this to say: I think this view is unnecessarily extreme. I think the correct way it should have been presented is that performance reviews should be done in a more useful way. Not all performance reviews are for the purpose of rationalizing bonuses. I think feedback on one's performance accompanied with goal setting of specific behaviors is fundamental in sustaining good work and motivation in employees. I do think that ranking employees doesn't work most of the time because it not only creates competition but discourages those who have been performing well, but just not so much as others who could potentially be ass-kissers as what the article says. The bottom line is that , w/o a review/feedback on your on-going performance, you wouldn't have an idea of what you should work towards to and u cant assume that all employees are intrinsically motivated to do better. Heuristically, people lose their sense of engagement about 5 months after they are hired and this can keep deteriorating if immediate supervisors don't provide the support/encouragement/feedback. One last thing, research has repeatedly shown that regular performance feedback increases motivation and performance in the long-run. what's important really is how the feedback is given.

hillel 17y ago
I generally agree with your girlfriend. And to be clear, I never said that regular consistent performance feedback was bad. I said that the annual performance review was not a substitute for it.

ironkeith 17y ago

In my experience employee reviews are typically de-motivational. My employer has me rate my team members on a scale from 1 to 6 on a variety of work related criteria. The basis for getting a raise rests on the employees ability to increase their ratings on a review to review period. It's horrible (and I've told them I think so). The entire ratings system is ripe to be exploited by people who know how to play the game. This is especially bad if non-technical people are reviewing technical people. I had to witness the worst developer on my team become the highest paid because he knew how to sell himself and could speak a language that upper management understood. I'm more in favor of (arguably) less subjective methods of determining an employees worth (like Bioware's RPG style ratings, or Joel Spolsky's ladder). There's still room for person bias, but at least there's less room.

paulreiners 17y ago
> This is especially bad if non-technical people are reviewing technical people. Hear, hear. There is nothing more maddening than having someone dumber than you tell you that you're dumb once a year.
Tamerlin 17y ago
My situation is similar; the manager who decides on reviews for our "team" THINKS he's technical, but he's basically useless. He hinders communication between team members, reassigns people to projects arbitrarily and without warning, and has had a 100% attrition rate for his team since he joined it. No one, even folks on other teams, have had good experiences working with him, because the one thing that he does NOT do is work to remove barriers that we developers have to face in order to get our jobs done. (He creates far more barriers than he removes.) And yet HE is the one who evaluates OUR performance... making the entire process a waste of time. To top it off, he isn't even honest in his reviews... as far as I can tell it's all politics for him, basically doing anything he can to shift blame down from him onto us.
- Silhouette 17y ago
  This is why everyone's review should include feedback from peers and, where applicable, subordinates. It's also a good argument for including discussions with your boss's boss in your review, to avoid a poor but politically savvy manager being able to competely filter feedback from everyone below them to the higher-ups who could do something about that poor manager in the middle.

cscott 17y ago

Employee performance reviews that enforce an arbitrary curve-based ranking or grading system often to do more harm than good. I have seen employees who have performed well all year get demolished by a performance review where they were rated a "3" or "4" out of "5" because HR required only one "5" per department and two or three "4"s, and expect the majority of employees to be a "3". (Thankfully, they didn't require that each department designate a "1" goat.) That being said, I have found that performance reviews that focus on how the employee has improved the business and seized opportunities (or not) and focus less on artificial competition are extremely beneficial.

tom_b 17y ago
+1 for mentioning the arbitrary curve-based ranking common in big companies. Tightly coupling salary/bonuses to performance reviews with this type of system is a disaster. Unfortunately, my experience is that most managers in such a system lack the insight to minimize the effect on employees. Maybe when you're talking about minimizing the effect of telling an employee they are (non-deservedly) one of the "3" performers, you've already lost the battle . . . Add in the inevitable weird corporate culture stuff "you are a '3' because you got promoted this year, it's just your turn in the box" and you have a perfect recipe for draining motivation away from employees.

mclin 17y ago

The last company I worked for had these '360' performance reviews where you get reviewed by a few coworkers as well as your boss. Also there was no money involved. I thought it worked really well. While you'd hope your coworkers would give you pointers on how you could improve throughout the year, realistically, shyer developers won't do that, and this gives them the opportunity to do so (mostly) anonymously.

sokoloff 17y ago

If you eliminate performance reviews altogether, and issues rewards as team rewards, why would top performers (the ones who might regularly bank 7-15% raises instead of 2-4% raises) stay with your company for the rock-steady, everyone-gets-5% return, when they can go somewhere else and make meaningfully more money? It seems that the socialist (not tarring, just naming) approach to granting team raises is a powerful attraction to low performers. In a small startup, with relatively little money to throw around, it probably doesn't matter and eliminating them may actually be a net win. Once the company reaches the 500+ person mark, failing to recognize ($$) individual achievement just demotivates and chases away those who would be your stars.

Silhouette 17y ago
But what is "individual achievement" in a field like software development? In the sort of teams one typically finds in those 500+ person organisations, nothing is truly done by individuals. Even if a genius developer produces a brilliant implementation of new feature quickly and with a low bug count, someone had the idea for that feature and worked out how it was going to integrate with other features, many people probably wrote a load of other code the feature depends on even if that code didn't itself create the same buzz, people were involved in testing the feature, producing the marketing, and on and on. While everyone might agree that the genius developer had done a good job for the team, how can you say quantitatively and objectively what his contribution was? 10%? 25%? 90%? In contrast, the success of a project team is generally fairly easy to quantify: divide the cost of running the team by the amount of revenue generated by the projects they produce. The sad reality is that while serious guru developers may indeed be an order of magnitude more productive than average, and some at the other end of the scale are actually counterproductive, salaries for employees will never realistically reflect this. The bottom-feeders always get more than they deserve, while the top guys will never get credit proportionate to their contribution. After all, this is why many of us get out and go freelance or start our own businesses. But within that reality, I can't help wondering whether the guys at the top would still rather work with a motivated team than be individually slightly better compensated but surrounding by jealous, bitter colleagues.
- 17y ago