Adobe has abolished annual performance reviews in favor of more frequent, lighter-weight check-ins. My company has annual reviews but since I became a manager it has been my goal to make those reviews a non-event. That is, I try to have weekly check-ins (one-on-ones) that bite off performance review a week at a time. Read the article for Adobe’s take.
My own challenges:
- It can be easy to be too zoomed in during weekly check-ups. So I’ve been adding monthly and quarterly triggers for higher level discussions.
- In an agile development environment it can be hard to set long range goals. Each developer is more or less committed to doing whatever comes next off of the backlog. Creating metrics that give concrete feedback while valuing all the important work being done is an enormous challenge. I’ve found that when you do hit on a good metric people are relieved to see the evidence of their good work being recognized.
Thank you to this week’s Mad Sad Glad from Manager Tools for the link.
You may not be able to abolish performance reviews, but if you’re a manager you can shrink them.
