Everyone loves to hate performance evaluations, and with good reason: Research has shown them to be ineffective, unreliable and unsatisfactory for seemingly everyone involved. They consume way too much time, leave most workers deflated and feel increasingly out of step with reality.

…more than half the executives questioned (58%) believe that their current performance management approach drives neither employee engagement nor high performance. [Click here to see the survey.]

 


 

…conversations about year-end ratings are generally less valuable than conversations conducted in the moment about actual performance.

 


 

Three items correlated best with high performance for a team:

  1. I have the chance to use my strengths every day
  2. My coworkers are committed to doing quality work
  3. The mission of our company inspires me

 


 

It’s not the particular number we assign to a person that’s the problem; rather, it’s the fact that there is a single number. … we want our organizations to know us, and we want to know ourselves at work, and that can’t be compressed into a single number.

Reinventing Performance Management
Harvard Business Review

The new approach focuses, alternatively, on how to develop employees in the future given their current performance.

 

–What if you could replace performance evaluations
with four simple questions?

Deloitte has come up with them
(and two only need a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer).

By Jena McGregor in the Washington Post

 


 

More on this blog about improving employee evaluations