According to a recent survey conducted by Adobe, 58 percent of people feel that performance reviews “are a needless Human Resources (HR) requirement.” Adobe, in fact, no longer has an annual performance review process and instead, has adopted an approach involving ongoing discussions between managers and employees that emphasize talent development and future productivity instead of formal ratings and rankings based on past performance.
Still, the vast majority of companies continue to persist with a backwards-looking evaluation process that is time-consuming for managers, demotivating for employees and of negligible benefit to the business as a whole. They do this because, as Adobe’s survey respondents suspected, performance reviews are more about “compliance than customer service”.
