Check out any blog, book or article about why employees quit their jobs, and you’ll find lack of feedback among the top reasons. (Often even before salary.) This may make you think that employee reviews are an important retention tool. You’d be logically consistent, but wrong. Research shows that pretty much every employee, including those who are eager to learn and develop, hates performance reviews. What gives?
A Look at the Dreaded Employee Performance Review
There are several factors that contribute to employee acrimony toward the employee review.- It’s too infrequent to be useful – Employee performance reviews are usually conducted annually, bi-annually or quarterly. Giving someone input weeks, months or even a year after they’ve accomplished, or mishandled something is just not that helpful. Context gets lost and after-the-fact advice is futile.
- It feels punitive – No matter how the review is conducted, it feels like an opportunity for criticism and puts people on the defensive. By the way, employees are on to the feedback sandwich method (one positive thing, one negative thing, one positive thing). When positive and negative feedback is mixed into one session, you can bet that the negative will extinguish any good feelings from the positive.
- It’s inauthentic – Employees know that managers must conduct employee performance reviews. This makes even the most positive feedback feel forced and disingenuous. The formality undermines a manager’s attempts to convey genuine appreciation or concern.
- It is disconnected from goals and objectives – Often what an employee considers their goals and objectives are misaligned with how they are measured in a performance review. They may think they’ve done great work, only to find that expectations were unclear.
What Makes Feedback Valuable
The fact that employees hate performance reviews should not be construed to mean that they don’t want to know how they are doing. Quite the opposite, employees want as much feedback as they can get when they are preforming well and when they aren’t. Feedback is valuable because:- It happens in real-time – If someone does a great job, they want confirmation of that right away. If they are struggling, real-time feedback gives them the opportunity to resolve the problem quickly and learn from the experience.
- It feels supportive – Feedback comes from a place of mentoring more than measuring and it makes employees feel like managers are engaged in helping them succeed. Employees want to know that when they are successful, their accomplishments will be recognized and when they aren’t, coaching will be offered.
- It’s natural – Rather than the one way assessment offered in employee performance reviews, feedback from supervisors is a collaborative way of working together. It is more of a conversation than an oration on the employee’s work.
- It is aligned with practical objectives – Performance reviews usually involve an arbitrary list of performance categories. Feedback, on the other hand, is usually tied to the specific goals, priorities, and initiatives of the day.
