Are performance reviews useful?

Most of us are used to the annual (or semi-annual) cadence of performance reviews. You sit down with your boss and go over what you’re doing well, discuss any weaknesses, and agree on your goals for the upcoming year. At best, it can be a good chance to get aligned with your manager about your priorities—or even make a case for why you deserve a promotion.

But can they also be a waste of time, or even detrimental to larger company-wide goals of communication and teamwork? That’s what Behnam Tabrizi suggests in his new book Going on Offense: A Leader’s Playbook for Perpetual Innovation, excerpted recently in Fast Company. 

“In reality they do more harm than good because employees focus on impressing their manager rather than on performance per se,” Tabrizi says. A better solution is frequent and relevant feedback, he argues, even though “while it seems intuitive to provide immediate feedback to employees, few companies actually do so.”

That’s not to say that there’s no place for a more formal performance review process. If your company still conducts these reviews, there are certain components that should be included, such as a focus on professional development, writes contributor Art Markman in Fast Company this week. After all, “the most effective organizations use performance reviews as a key part of a process of continuous improvement,” he says. “When used in this way, performance reviews become a driver of personal development and organizational growth.”