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For Younger Employees, The Annual Performance Review Is An Outdated Concept

For Younger Employees, The Annual Performance Review Is An Outdated Concept
by Michelle Brown

For many employees the end of the financial year signals performance review time. The dreaded time of the year when they sit down with their supervisor and receive feedback on their performance over the previous 12 months.

In Australia and the US, businesses are reconsidering this traditional approach to managing employee performance. Managers are worried the traditional approach is resource intensive, emphasizes employee evaluation over development and tends to be retrospective. Feedback delivered after an event, can leave employees with an inaccurate assessment of their performance.

Employees vary in their views on the frequency of feedback. One survey found that baby boomers prefer less frequent feedback while millennials prefer more. Experienced workers know the job so see no value in feedback. Younger workers feel blindsided by feedback that comes but once a year.

An alternative would be to drop traditional performance reviews and implement regular feedback sessions with employees – maybe twice yearly, quarterly, monthly or even weekly.

One study found that feedback interventions (both positive and negative feedback) resulted in lower performance in over one third of cases examined. Another study suggests that feedback without any consequences won’t be effective. This study reported that when feedback was used alone, it produced consistent improvements in performance in only 28% of the cases examined.

Feedback, maybe just not constantly

The argument for increasing the frequency of feedback is that it will provide more timely information that employees can use to learn and be more effective. This is particularly the case when it’s tied to events in the workplace. One study
found that more frequent feedback improves employee learning and task performance.

A subsequent study also found that increasing the frequency of feedback had a positive effect on learning and performance but only up to a point.

It gets to a point where feedback can be overwhelming for employees, where its too much to process and respond to. This can actually reduce employee learning and performance. The challenge is to find the sweet spot between too much and too little feedback.

Read full article on Quartz Media.