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March is a month that holds so much promise. After all, it’s the official start of Spring - days are getting longer, temperatures are getting warmer, and flowers are even starting to peek through the dirt and show those first signs of green. It also means PTO, and while Mark is working on his “tan” (see photo of Mark for the joke), I’ve taken over the Voice of HR newsletter.
If you work in one of the thousands of organizations that follows an annual performance review cycle, March means something else. It means taking part in feedback sessions for ratings that were submitted up to five months ago on goals that were set a year ago to justify the same merit increase employees have been getting for the past ten years. For managers who hold regular 1:1s with their employees, the whole process feels redundant. For employees whose managers never talk to them outside of the mandatory year-end conversation, the process feels like a box-checking exercise.
Hardly anyone is happy with this approach - including HR. It’s administratively burdensome and disrupts the rhythm of the business. Yet for some reason, people are reluctant to stop the practice. The most common reasons cited are merit considerations, documentation for defensible terminations, and the fact that some managers would never give an employee feedback unless forced to.
First of all, if you have a manager who never gives employees feedback, annual performance reviews are NOT going to fix your leadership problem. Additionally, many annual performance reviews reflect inflated ratings in an effort to game the merit calculation. As a result, some organizations have instituted an “anytime review” approach to try and manufacture documentation that should have been handled through corrective action a lot time ago. Merit considerations can be tricky...unless you rethink what “pay for performance” really means and start to focus more on individual and team contributions and less on arbitrary cascaded goals.
I see an opportunity for organizations to finally break free of the “tradition” of annual performance appraisals. All processes are up for grabs after the year we’ve had - why not break the cycle and try something new? If the most important aspect of performance reviews is the conversations - as HR has claimed since time immemorial - then let’s focus on the conversations. Make it simple, easy to use, and accessible for managers, employees, and stakeholders alike. Reward employees for activities they have control over and stop punishing them for factors outside of their control. Make giving feedback central to the role of a manager, and hold them accountable to it; not by checking a box, but by asking employees and leaders alike how well managers are delivering feedback.
IA has embarked on a new approach to performance and merit, one that embraces continuous feedback. personal control, and reflects the values that we believe are important as an organization. We are three months into our experiment, and we will be sharing what we’ve learned soon. If we want “employees to own their careers,” it starts with implicit trust and the support system to allow them to thrive.
Our approach may not work for everyone. No performance management process is “one size fits all,” so I just encourage everyone to start trying on new methods. Why let talent acquisition have all the fun - it's time to bust our performance management brackets once and for all.
With warm(ing) regards,
— Mary Faulkner
Principal/employee support champion, IA
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