Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/149047
Talent Management Crowd Pleaser A new approach to data-driven performance reviews leverages social recognition. By Eric Mosley The traditional performance review is frozen in time. Its design is outdated and its implementation is typically mediocre. Unless you fix it, your company itself will perform—as the review itself might say—below expectations. Problems with the traditional review are serious and structural. There is no quick fix. As we will see, there are culture-killing flaws embedded in the traditional review system's design. Improving execution of a broken practice won't eradicate the problems, for the pathology has already been strengthened by decades of repetition. In theory, a performance review rewards good performance and stimulates underperforming employees to improve. This is supposed to create a cycle of ever-improving work performance based on objective criteria, raising morale and profits across the board. In practice, the traditional review often produces the opposite effect. Too frequently, performance reviews create discouragement, mistrust, bewilderment, cynicism, and low morale. Worse, in today's workplace, the traditional review fails to recognize and address critical changes in the way we work. Let's consider the qualities that make the traditional review so problematic by imagining a standard performance review as it is today. It is a dull, predictable, and dreaded ritual. Employee and manager meet once a year to discuss the employee's work goals and behavior. The employee is rated on how well he or she has performed over the previous 12 months. There is a form, typically rating the employee along [26] HRO TODAY MAGAZINE | JULY/AUGUST 2013 a numeric or phased scale (meets expectations, exceeds expectations, or does not meet expectations). There is feedback and perhaps a salary increase. And the next formal conversation on performance won't take place for another year, when formal performance review time rolls around again. While technology, management techniques, and organizational models have undergone revolutionary change over the past few decades, the performance review has plodded along in the same format since it was invented. Even technical enhancements, such as the use of online forms, have only mimicked the old model. Let's imagine a new model that still has structure and formality, but has changed to include real-time, ongoing crowdsourced input and data. The people with whom the employee interacts have judged their performance, augmenting the single judgment of their manager. Instead of creating a one-time evaluation of performance, the manager is informed by a yearlong narrative of the employee's accomplishments, skills, and behavior. This crowdsourced review overcomes frustrating weaknesses of the traditional performance review using technologies and even habits that have appeared recently in the workplace.