This article, by Vauhini Vara at The New Yorker blog, struck a chord with me, mainly because I've by now conducted perhaps a hundred of these mandatory performance reviews and have always had a sneaking suspicion that they are, at best, a colossal waste of everyone's time. Turns out, evidently, that the people who study these kinds of things think I'm right!
Vara mentions that performance reviews have the potential to ruin work relationships and also that managers and supervisors tend to shy away from giving frank feedback. I guess both these things are viewed as problems, but isn't it obvious that the one is the cause of the other? People understand the necessity of maintaining good working relationships and therefore mix in so much sugar with their criticism that the criticism becomes unrecognizable. Tom Kelly, the former field manager of the Minnesota Twins, said that "good managing is getting people into positions where they can succeed." Telling people that they have to conduct annual performance reviews is too much like the opposite of that. If only a few navigators can steer past Scylla and Charbydis, you'll eliminate a lot of catastrophes by not requiring anyone to try.
Vara also mentions that people who give performance reviews rarely, when they are in the other chair, get rated themselves on the quality of the reviews they give. This is considered to be a bad thing, but again, it tends toward the necessary. To a significant degree, the performance review is a private transaction, so the rater's rater isn't in a position to rate. The person who might know is the employee whose performance was reviewed, but, of course, this person's testimony isn't impartial. If it could be known that the supervisor or manager is bad at conducting performance reviews, it would hardly be worth saying so, since almost everyone is bad at it on account of the difficulties involved.
That it is not worth mentioning a person's deficiencies applies in other areas, too. For example, with a lot of decent, earnest, industrious people, the thing holding them back is the part of the review template in which the phrase "cognitive skills" is most apt to appear. In other words, they could be smarter. But, no, they actually can't be smarter. It's useless to exhort someone to be better at, say, reaching sound conclusions by applying general principles to the unusual facts of certain specific cases that will arise without warning. If the boss, supposedly in the interests of being "frank," determines to suggest that someone has too few neurons firing, the world recognizes the calling card of an a-hole. Some people enjoy running other people down, and the performance review affords them the opportunity. The whole office drinks their poison.
Where I work, the written performance evaluation was for a long time mainly an exercise in circling 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 to indicate the employee's strength or weakness in a series of categories. A score of anything other than 3 required written comments. Predictably, I got a lot of 3s. Maybe I would get one 4, in "Customer Service," which was accompanied by the sentence, "Eric provides excellent service to our customers." Just completely worthless, but I don't doubt that a lot of reviews, from the organization's standpoint, are a lot worse than merely worthless.
One of the many annoying catch phrases of office life is "measurable results." We all love results that can be measured--or, at least, we are supposed to. The same people pounding that drum have decreed that we all shall receive an annual performance review, the beneficial effects of which are theoretical. To the degree that outcomes can be measured, the consensus seems to be that performance reviews are either positively bad or else not worth the time and effort. I predict that they will live on, however--for the same reason that football coaches will continue to punt on fourth-and-two at the fifty. Skeptical contrarians tend not to be promoted into positions where they can extirpate practices that, for whatever poor reason, have won admittance to The Catechism.
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