Death of the Annual Performance Appraisal
Type “annual performance review” in Google right now. Standing in stark contrast to the paid ad at the top of the page touting the value of one vendor’s performance appraisal solution, you will find link after link to articles like Huffington Post’s “The Annual Performance Review: #FAIL,” Businessweek’s “The Annual Performance Review: Worthless Corporate Ritual,” and Business Insider’s “Adobe Abolished Annual Performance Review.” They all share a common theme: the annual performance review is a relic, a thing of the past that began with good intentions but has done little to advance the goal of improving employee performance. In fact, it seems they do more harm than good. Why not do away with them altogether?
You might imagine that as the CTO of a software company that develops talent management software, I might be a bit nervous about what is clearly a rapidly developing trend in our market. On the contrary, I’m dancing a jig! I promise I will keep the product/company plug to a minimum if you read further. TalentGuard was founded on the principle that employee performance is best achieved by measuring performance against role-specific objective measures. Not the one-size-fits-all assessments, the subject of much disdain. Let me explain…
The fundamental flaw with the annual performance appraisal is the appraisal itself. The classic general behavioral assessment does little if anything to help an employee understand how they perform relative to a complete set of objective performance criteria for their particular role. What if you could replace this general assessment with one tailored to each role? Would that affect the outcome? Intuitively and empirically, we know that such an approach is superior to the classic model. I believe it is the only effective approach and supports the movement to kill the classic performance appraisal as we know it today.
The key is having a “complete set of objective performance measures tied to each role,” i.e., a better appraisal. Before the advent of modern web applications, these objective measures, or competency models, were very difficult to develop, let alone apply to a company with more than a handful of roles. For those reading who may have never heard of competency models, a competency model refers to the specific competencies characteristic of high performance and success in a given job and can include both technical and behavioral competencies across skills and abilities. Typically, skills are thought of as learned, whereas abilities are innate. For example, I can develop the skill to manage but may lack the innate ability to lead with empathy, and thus my effectiveness as a leader may be less than needed for my role. Both can be developed.
Since there are many roles (jobs) in any given company, there can be many competency models. HR departments, however, struggle to get value from the application of role-specific competency models due to the overwhelming amount of data that must be pulled together and applied to every role and, ultimately, every individual. It’s nearly impossible to do this manually within a company with more than a few dozen roles. We address this problem by providing a comprehensive framework manager, competency models from leading industry competency model developers, and a role management system that allows HR professionals to create roles tied directly to role-specific competency models.
Is the annual performance review on its way out the door? I certainly hope so! But before you abandon the idea of performance reviews altogether, take a look at how companies like TalentGuard are bringing better solutions to the market that ultimately deliver on a promise made over 60 years ago but never fulfilled.
If you’d like to learn more about the right way to develop your talent and retain your top performers, visit TalentGuard’s free learning center.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
Author’s Bio
Frank Ginac’s career spans over 30 years of building world-class enterprise software. A hands-on leader, Frank is the chief software architect of TalentGuard’s award-winning software suite and leads the team that develops the company’s innovative solutions. At TalentGuard, Frank is able to blend his passion for employee development and his breadth and depth of experience building complex software systems for global deployment to help create the leading workforce intelligence platform in the market today. He is the author of two books, including Building High-Performance Software Development Teams and Customer-Oriented Software Quality Assurance. Frank holds a BS in Computer Science from Fitchburg State University and an MS in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he specialized in Interactive Intelligence (the branch of Artificial Intelligence focused on creating intelligent and adaptive systems that interact with humans on their own terms).
“The work I most enjoy is writing code. It’s an endeavor that requires a high degree of creative problem-solving and collaboration. It’s through the collaborative and social process of code writing that I’ve been able to exercise my passion for leading the brilliant and creative people who have produced dozens of enduring and award-winning software products over the course of my career. Together, we have changed for the better how businesses operate, how students learn, and with my latest venture TalentGuard, how businesses help their employees grow in their careers. Most important, at the end of every line of code I’ve written or helped to write there’s a person whose day I’ve somehow made better.”
