by Gerhard Adam

Created on: December 14, 2008

Initially many people will respond with a positive answer to this question, because they presume that this is how one is recognized and achieves rewards. However, when examining this a bit closer, it raises several important concerns that also bear some consideration.

One of the most obvious problems is whether the individual doing the review is actually capable of assessing the quality of work done by an employee. In many cases, a manager may lack the expertise to make a competent assessment, or more often than not, actually doesn't have any real criteria to use to make such an assessment. As a result, we find that many managers will use arbitrary deadlines for assessing work, despite the fact that there is no business reason for the deadline. This simply becomes a performance metric that can help a manager justify an evaluation.

In truth, the role of the performance review is to provide a legal framework to avoid liabilities within a company so that promotions and discipline are documented within the corporate policy because most managers also don't have the authority to actually "manage" the people they are in charge of. In many cases, a bad review cannot be effectively countered because the manager is the final determining factor in how it will be presented. While an employee may have the opportunity to protest a review with additional written statements, the sad reality is that those comments will never be examined or considered and the only thing reflected in an employee's record will be the bad review.

A manager that doesn't know whether his staff is good or bad is simply inept. Any manager that doesn't know how his people are performing their tasks should be removed.

I've heard all the excuses about why this can be difficult, but these explanations are irrelevant since a manager's job is, by definition, to manage his people. Therefore when he doesn't know them, he doesn't know his job or how to deliver on what he is to be managing.

Another problem with performance reviews, is that they need to work in both directions, so that all employees are reviewed by those they regularly interact with. At present it is typically conducted as a "top-down" mechanism despite the fact that the person doing the reviewing is not the employer. This individual is also only an employee, so instead of promoting improved performance by an honest assessment of interactions and how they might be improved. The performance review becomes a thinly veiled rationalization for justifying a pay increase (or not as the case may be) which in many cases has already been pre-determined by budget considerations and not performance.

Basically it is my contention that performance reviews should be eliminated so that management cannot use them as a crutch to avoid knowing their employees. If a manager truly needs such a device to determine whether someone is good or bad at their job, then perhaps it is the manager that is incompetent, rather than the people supposedly being reviewed.

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