Is there anyone who enjoys the process of performance reviews? As a junior employee I always felt short changed by my bosses. As a leader I put in so much effort to provide detailed, actionable, personalized feedback, but it would take SO long to prepare, and was hard to digest when delivered in the mandatory yearly cycle.
So, what are you going to do about it Roshan? Well, what if performance feedback was weekly, only took 5 minutes to prepare, was provided in a true 360 degree fashion, was provided by people you had directly worked with in the proceeding week, was directly tied to your strategic commercial goals and personal development goals, was smart enough to aggregate and identify trends and themes, and also smart enough to score and prioritize high quality feedback as well?
That sounds too good to be true, I hear you say! Well, clearly you haven’t been thinking about this as long as I have. Seems like its fairly easy to build a performance feedback tool that gets everyone in the company to provide 5 minute performance feedback once a week. It selects who you have to give feedback for, based on who you worked with in the last week (according to your calendar or team structure). The feedback you give is directly tied to pre-filled strategic and professional development targets for the individual, and is intelligently curated according to past feedback given. The feedback you give is measured against previous feedback the person has received, as well as your seniority, in order to assess its quality and provide YOU with a performance feedback score, which is part of your own performance feedback. (In this way it also prevents bias, where someone might be tempted to give someone unreasonably bad feedback, that would be detected as an outlier, or similarly so would excessively positive feedback.)
Feedback is never given in its raw form, but aggregated up to identify trends and themes. It would provide you with priorities to focus on that are tracked from week to week, so you can measure your improvement over time, and giving you a CLEAR metric of your development over the course of the year.
Instead of feedback being given rarely, it is received weekly. It is detached form the individual giving it to you, and anonymized so it can be received more easily, in a space and time when you are ready to receive it. The feedback itself is designed to be balanced, so it is easy to digest, and framed according to a continuous learning mindset. It comes from true 360 degrees so is not dependent on your boss liking (or hating) you.
Your boss can be involved in helping you to understand it, and coaching you to improve on it, so it can still have the personalized touch.
Plus it builds peoples feedback giving skills, and develops a culture of constructive feedback.
At the end of each year where employees are invariably ranked for bonuses and the like, it becomes a data driven activity based on 50 data points, not 1.
One argument against this might be, how would people act if they now every interaction has the potential for being judged? Would they be more conservative? Avoid conflict perhaps? Maybe, and perhaps thats a good thing, OR even better they learn to work constructively and collaboratively and focus on outcomes. People will prioritize helping one another, over protecting their turf. If everyone is judging your performance, not just your boss, your incentives are to help everyone and work together in a true company wide manner, not protect your bosses turf.
Seems like its a much fairer system if you ask me.
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