What about Performance Management?—Part 1

Ah, Groundhog Day! That wonderful time of the year when people think about performance appraisals.

What, everyone doesn’t think about performance appraisals on Groundhog Day? Well, they should. It’s entirely appropriate; just think of all the parallels:

• It comes over and over again.
• Nothing comes of it. (Think of Bill Murray and the movie.)
• It’s frustrating. (How many ways did Bill try to kill himself?)
• The results are usually wrong. (At least, that’s the revealed wisdom: Punxsutawney Phil gets the weather forecast right only about one-third of the time. And many would argue that performance appraisals are only right about the same percentage.)

Many companies, mostly out of frustration we suspect, are doing away with performance appraisals altogether. Given how little value people place in them and how frustrating they are for supervisors to do, complete surrender may be an entirely appropriate solution.

But at the same time, anecdotal evidence shows that millennials want more frequent performance feedback.

So how can you reconcile these two opposing trends: mounting frustration leading to eliminating performance appraisals and performers desiring more frequent performance feedback?

That is the subject of the next blog post in this series. For now, we invite you to ponder these questions:

• Are performance appraisals appreciated in your organization?
• Is performance feedback given in a timely and meaningful way?
• How objective and measurable are the performance measures that are being used?