The author of the article, Xavier Shaye, conducts an Engineering Leadership training course. Most recently, he served as director of payment development and analysis at Square, trained managers and executives of the company.

What is the best career advice you have ever received? I bet he didn’t come from an annual report reviewing employee performance (performance review).

Formalized reports of this kind are, at best, too expensive and have minimal benefits, and at worst, they really harm the development and morale of the company. They remained a relic from the time when they were the only meaningful interaction between the manager and the team.

It was assumed that the performance report will become a tool for learning and moving up the career ladder. However, I worked in many companies, including with employees whose thinking is aimed at development . And everywhere such reports from the personnel department caused a general groan. People consider them awkward, uncomfortable and distracting from work. Managers lose four hours to prepare a report - both working time and sleep time, trying to accurately formulate the assessment of their employees.

There are teams of creative people who crave feedback, people who want to learn and grow. Let's not stifle them with bureaucracy.

Top Alternatives

If done well, official performance reviews are useful for coaching. But there are many more effective means of achieving the same goals. Here is one process that I successfully applied (adaptation from Catalytic Coaching , an excellent textbook on this topic): write an assessment for myself and pass it on to the manager. Try to answer three questions:

1. What have I done for the company lately?
2. What have I done for myself?
3. Who do I want to be in the end? (And what do I need for this?)

I usually suggest that employees do this every 6–12 months. Nothing too formal, just unordered notes in a notebook. These notes are used as a guide for an oral presentation to you, their manager. As a manager, you have one job: listen! This is a common mistake in most formal systems: managers speak first, not listen.

When you listen, you notice something. A person forgets to mention a big project that led at the beginning of the year. He seems unaware that in the eyes of the others the other project was a failure. He asks for advice on career enhancement. Using this information, you can reply. Either now or next time if you need more time to get ready.

Sometimes you want to write something down: for example, if a person asks for a more structured answer or help on a specific topic. Here your actions look like a typical formal review, but with a huge difference: you were actually asked to give specific recommendations. You can prepare something much more personal that most likely will work. You first listened and did not apply a general approach to everyone. This is a much more efficient use of your time, especially if the people in the team are already effectively using one-on-one negotiations with the manager.

Most of the time, the person’s self-esteem will be in line with what he expressed one-on-one; she will be an honest assessment of her position and a statement of a good sense of progress. How is this worse than a five-page formal report on employee performance? It is better to spend your time on people who really need and want such help.

What about colleagues?

Formal performance reviews are often the only way to get feedback from colleagues and from reports. Isn't that valuable? Not as it is usually done.

It is difficult to write objective reviews on colleagues, especially if you have not worked with them so closely. People postpone these reviews for later, spend time and in the end still do not give you (as a manager who collects the results) some useful material.

To make matters worse, it seems that this is exclusively managerial concern. Most of the reviews about colleagues that I collected in this way (good and bad reviews) are of real benefit to coaching how to effectively provide feedback. Avoid the temptation to establish an anonymous and synthetic feedback channel, because reviews should really be transmitted only in person. This also applies to positive reviews, and to them it may be even more so: depriving people of the opportunity to receive direct praise is a lost opportunity.

It is still important to provide an outlet for feedback without direct confrontation. But to write a couple of sentences of a mandatory reply for the HR department is not good. Instead, try talking to people as someone's manager about your person. You will receive better information, because you will receive non-verbal signals and define “partial” opinions that people are not comfortable with expressing in a coherent written form. Often these are the most important opinions, and they are completely lost when people compose a decorated text.

It is especially difficult to resolve the power imbalance between you and the people you are asking for feedback. Always get permission from a person before collecting opinions about him. Kim Scott's advice to tell the truth about his superiors at meetings (council number 6) is a great example of how to solve a problem with collecting feedback about managers.

Disguised employee performance report?

[Note: this section was added after the initial publication of 12.06.2018]

As far as I came across this term, the performance review of employees (performance review) usually comes from managers mainly for evaluation . Focus on review . What I propose is a process that comes from employees with the main goal of coaching and development . Any retrospective review can only serve prospective coaching.

If employees do not want to participate, that's fine. If, as a manager, I feel that someone needs to say something without asking, I do not expect a formal procedure for this.

Principles

Any corporate process requires critical evaluation:

• What is the purpose? What problems or opportunities does it affect?
• How much?
• Is the process of achieving this a reasonable price?

Often, both performance deficiencies are inherent in formal performance reviews: they do not correspond to the stated goals, and are costly. I find that writing self assessment and direct conversation is more effective. These processes provide strong feedback through instant validation and an emphasis on listening . Therefore, they save a lot of time and effort.

As managers, we shape the processes and culture of our company. Our task is to deal with burdensome and ineffective reports on the work of employees. Find such a growth method so that both you and the team will be delighted!