Description

On this podcast episode of My Job Here Is Done, we trash conventional performance reviews and have a lot of fun doing it!

Why? Because of the way most companies and leaders do them, they suck for everyone involved and do little if any good. We’ll tell you our reasoning for this opinion in the program.

There are articles out there that lean toward not doing Performance Reviews at all. We think they have an important place, and although a common theme is “we do them just because,” performance reviews are not a cavalier “check a box” item. 

People’s careers and growth depend on good feedback through performance reviews. In this podcast episode, we ponder this and come up with alternative ways to help with career success and business growth by suggesting ways to make performance reviews worthy of everybody’s time and effort. 

We find that there are five basic forms of classic performance reviews, they are:

1. The Autobiographical Review - this is where the employee writes a review of themselves. Really? All this can do is cause an argument with your manager.
2. The Biographical Review - this is where the manager writes a review of the employee. And by reverse osmosis, this too can create an argument scenario.
3. The 1 through 5 Review - the team member is pigeon-holed into a class between exceptional and brilliant - a 5 - down to worthless and waste of protoplasm - a 1 - and likely neither, but somewhere in between.
4. The ScoreBoard Review - this ridiculous review considers everyone to be average and then the employee is placed above, or below average compared to the rest of the team. How is this helpful?
5. The Everybody-Gets-A-Whack-At-Me Review - this is also known more commonly (but less humorously) as the 360 or full circle review. Here the employee hopes all the people he pissed off at the last meeting won’t remember and will give him wonderful kudos on the review.

There are other methods of performance reviews, but they all - except one - take a page from the playbooks of those just mentioned.

The one different approach, and you can have a lot of variations to it, is the continuous review process. We talk about it in this My Job Here Is Done podcast episode. 

Continuous performance reviews have no schedule. They’re not done yearly, quarterly or monthly. They are not supposed to be tied to salary or merit increases, and especially not to discipline - that’s the job of the performance improvement plan. Continuous performance reviews are done as needed, as often (or not), as required. They are, in essence, check-in agreements. The agreement part is that the manager and the employee are in full agreement with the current performance and near-term expectations.

We read a lot of articles as we prepared for this episode, but this one stood out

Visit the My Job Here Is Done website to listen to all of the episodes and learn how you can work with us if you like our thoughts and ideas.