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Are performance appraisals still relevant in today’s society?

Thu Jan 28 2021

. 3 min read

Most employees of a certain age are familiar with the following scenario: you get a note from your boss or the human resources department that it’s time for your annual performance appraisal. Then you meet with your boss one-on-one to find out what you’re doing wrong and right in your job and whether or not you might see a pay raise anytime soon. It’s nerve-wracking and can be incredibly stressful, both for you and your boss. But is this even a valid way of assessing an employee’s work anymore? With so many workplaces switching to a remote work model for the next several months – if not longer – how can we expect to reasonably evaluate an employee’s performance if we don’t even work in the same building anymore? We can’t, according to the Future of Work Media website: “Research supports the fact that performance reviews are pretty much universally viewed as ineffective. So it generated a lot of attention, if not a ton of surprise, when GE—recently named by Forbes as the ninth largest company in the world —announced it was scrapping annual performance reviews in favor of more frequent engagement with employees.   HR professionals, recruiters, and organizational change experts have been forecasting the demise of the performance review for years, not just because research says we don’t like them, but because they’re all but irrelevant for a broad swath of employees. Millennials and their more mature counterparts in the workplace are often more likely to request, and respond positively to, regular feedback that both recognizes stellar performance as well as identifies how they can improve. This is a change from the status quo, but that’s good news for managers. Not only are workers more likely to be open to feedback, there are tech tools that make that dialogue easier.” So if your company is still relying on performance reviews to tell your employees how to do their jobs more effectively, it may be time to embrace change. The global Coronavirus pandemic has forced sweeping changes for many companies; how can you better utilize available technology to give your employees ongoing performance feedback?