Are performance reviews a waste of time?

We likeminded people need to rise up and work to kill the standard performance review. Employees and managers both dread the process because there is, at best no value in it. At worst, it demoralizes employees in a time when we also try to engage them.

Great post!

Jim Connolly
Organizational Performance Consultant
www.orgresults.net/newsblog

Performance reviews (PR) are a consultant's creation. If a manager truly is paying attention to the work being done by the people he supervises daily honest and forthright communication will provide feedback to both parties about the work being performed and the goals to be reached. To force a performance review into some set schedule is to ignore the flow of work and a manager's responsibility to give feedback in a timely manner. To hide behind a PR instead of confronting a poorly performing employee does a dis-service to both the employee and the company.

Shouldn't that be "Are performance reviews a waste of time?"

I believe,it is truly wastage of time. you just can,t judge a person on putting them 4-5 different parameters. Instead, managers should judge the employees/sub-ordinate on the basis of his abilities to do the things differently and try to push him/her in that area. I think, by doing that managers can act as a mentor and great results could be achieved.

From 1989-2003 I wrote resumes for about 7,000 clients. From that perspective performance reviews are good for two things: building a case to fire someone, or helping them pad their resume so they can get another job with a better company.

Steve,
I once worked as a manager in a company in the South that wasn't so great on human relations or management. They had been a very paternalistic firm that fired no one but eventually got a CEO from the textile industry which meant he treated people as widgets.
The firm's personnel appraisal system was all over the map. I generally liked the people I had and realized that by trying to be more szpecific and detailed in my annual appraisals (and in writing), I could actually protect them against capricious acts by bad top managers.
Peter Galuszka

In most large corporation, due to the extremely charged political environment, the Employer (Manager) has to rely on PR process. Most of the time, this is his only tool to push the agenda.

Yep.., subjective to who's in the good ol ' boys club!!!

I completely agree.
Performance reviews are one of the main reasons for turnover. People with low PR immediately began to look for other opportunities.

Sounds like this article was written by someone with a bad experience.... As for me, I appreciate the consistency of meeting with my boss for candid discussion. Without this scheduled review, we would have no standard report to share across the organization for promotion, and no regular schedule for employees to give feedback to management, and huge inconsistency throughout the company.