Rethinking the Review: Why We Are Getting Performance Evaluations All Wrong

Why does most everyone seem to dislike, if not hate, performance reviews? At this point, I don’t know what’s hated more — performance reviews or Mondays.

I think the intense dislike is multi-factored — a mix of procrastination, general dread, and a bit of indifference. Nearly every place I’ve worked, performance reviews are the most disliked time of the year. From my experience, employees hate them because they generally feel they aren’t objectively assessed and managers hate them because it feels like busy work when they’re already juggling so much. And for both managers and employees, there can be a general discomfort around giving and receiving feedback.

There needs to be a mindset shift for both managers and employees to get aligned with the goal of feedback. The mindset is coalescing behind the purpose of feedback: growth. And I mean growth that is sincerely human-centered.

If the term performance review is viewed as a pejorative, it’s time to revise our ideas about what the performance review process is and isn’t.

The primary responsibility falls to managers, who need to lead by example — i.e., making feedback a regular part of their interaction with their team and creating a culture of feedback. Creating a culture of feedback is not just manager-to-employee but also peer-to-peer. It’s about defining what feedback is, providing examples of how it can best be delivered, role modeling how it can be done better, and sharing different feedback models, like Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) or the four part feedback model.

People have been traumatized by meaningless feedback, which poisons the process because in the face of it, they can’t trust the feedback or the messenger. But let’s be honest — people hate giving feedback because it can create awkwardness and discomfort and people dislike receiving feedback because they might hear something other than praise. Life doesn’t work that way, though — we get feedback from our families, our friends, our customers, and a myriad of other sources. Think about your goal with feedback and what you do with it.

According to Ed Batista, an executive coach and instructor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, “Direct feedback is the most efficient way for people to gather information and learn from it. To become more effective and fulfilled at work, people need a keen understanding of their impact on others and the extent to which they’re achieving their goals in their working relationships”

Here’s another thing people won’t tell you about performance reviews — managers often don’t read them thoroughly. They have too little time and too much to do. They may just skim over what their employees have written, breeze past the peer feedback, and overall do the minimum. A study by CEB reveals that 95 percent of managers are dissatisfied with their companies’ review processes, largely due to their time-consuming nature and the added workload. Inefficiency often results in superficial assessments rather than thoughtful evaluations. The takeaway? Employees should strive to become more concise in their self-assessments. Managers juggling dozens of reviews will appreciate — and are more likely to fully read — succinct, data-driven summaries of the employee’s achievements and impact.

• Rebrand the process: Consider renaming performance reviews to “growth conversations” or “development check-ins.”
• Train managers better: Provide comprehensive training on effective feedback delivery and reception.
• Encourage regular feedback: Implement systems that promote ongoing, informal feedback throughout the year.
• Recognize good feedback: Celebrate managers and employees who excel at giving and receiving constructive feedback.

• Seek regular feedback: Don’t wait for formal reviews. Ask for input frequently.
• Practice self-reflection: Regularly assess your own performance and areas for growth.
• Embrace a growth mindset: View feedback as an opportunity for improvement, not criticism.
• Provide upward feedback: Offer constructive feedback to your managers to improve the process.

• Keep a win list: I keep a running win list of my accomplishments. It contains details, dates, and impact metrics. It can be very easy to forget all of the work that you contributed to or provided over the last several months. So you have to track it weekly, if not daily. It’s also affirming to write down those accomplishments and see the progress that’s been made.
• Use AI tools: Use your favorite AI tool to organize all those accomplishments to create a narrative around the totality of your work. A lot of folks have something called the blank page problem, where they need a bit of inspiration or a prompt to convey their performance. AI is a great blank page battler.
• Refer to 1:1 docs: Every week I meet with my boss and I also meet with my team. Most often, what we talk about is captured in our 1:1 docs. I use those docs to revisit what I accomplished over the review period and they help demonstrate my progress to date. More importantly, I don’t have to reinvent the wheel to write a thorough review of my output and impact.
• Aim for simple, not sophisticated: Too many times, people attempt to write a thesis-length review to share the magnitude of their impact. I’d argue that’s unnecessary. Focus instead on what you did and how you did it — and of course, the results, like metrics. Keeping it short and sweet cuts through the noise.