Happy New Year – or as I like to call it, Performance Review Season! Ah, performance reviews – soliciting manager responses from vacant stares, to beleaguered moaning, to frustrated tears. Every year, this is a little befuddling to me because I actually love being on the receiving end of a good performance review. I revel in any opportunity to try and see myself from an outside perspective, and find that these conversations often provide a perspective to my work that I can’t see myself. In that way, I have been lucky – most of my performance reviews have been from HR Leaders and Execs that really knew what they were doing and prioritized actionable performance guidance.

Formal performance reviews are a little like the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead – when they are good, they are very good indeed, but when they are bad, they are horrid. In the best circumstance, they are an invaluable tool to not only measure performance, but to improve it over time. So why do so many employees and even organizations view them as an administrative roadblock and a giant waste of time?

Probably because – like the 40 hour Monday to Friday in office workweek – the year end performance review is a remnant of a bygone era in business that desperately needs a 21st century update.

Common Issues in Yearly Performance Reviews

Issue 1: Performance reviews only capture a moment in time and aren’t representative of an entire year of work.

Trying to write a performance review in December often feels a bit like trying to recap a Netflix series after binge-watching five seasons in one weekend. I remember the big moments, but the details are a bit blurry. And yes, there is an argument to be made for taking notes throughout the year – but more likely, the core issue is that at the speed at which business now moves, there is way too much output in a calendar year to shove into a single review.

Solution: Shorter Check Ins, More Often

Even the best, most in depth, clearly articulated year end performance review isn’t half as helpful as ongoing feedback. If I had a dollar for every time I said “this process isn’t how you performance manage, this should be the bow on top” – well, I’d have a lot of dollars. Hundreds, at least. Enough to get a really nice meal to make me feel better about the fact that this is, in too many organizations, rarely the case. Rather that waiting till year end to provide managers with specific processes and expectations in regards to how they talk to their people about performance, I’d like to see more organizations move towards shorter, more frequent check ins. For most mid size companies, quarterly is probably a good place to start. These reviews should be 2 – 4 questions that boil down to the following message: What is going well? What isn’t going well, and how could it be better? Having that documented 4x a year provides a much more complete picture of an individual’s performance.

Issue 2: Performance review forms are often irrelevant to how employees actually work.

I love a good set of core values as much as the next girl. However, if your core values aren’t actually integral to how you work on the daily, they’re going to feel pretty bland on a performance review form. Competencies listed should have clear, concise definitions that are relevant to everyone – which is really hard to do! Especially when dealing with very different, dispersed groups doing very different work.

Solution: Keep It Simple & Reinvest in Managers

Look – the only thing a performance review really needs to measure is just that. Performance. If there are traits or competencies the employee possess or does not possess that are seriously helping or hurting in their performance – yes, definitely discuss those. Ultimately, successful reviews are going to come from prepared managers who understand the organization’s bar for performance, the requirements of the role, and the capabilities of that employee. Organizations can try to implement sameness for the conversations top down, and it may make some of those conversations better – but it will also make some of them worse. I think the most successful performance reviews are actually those that provide less structure within the form, and focus more on helping the employee recap their work and the manager craft a meaningful message. Again – What is going well? What isn’t going well, and how could it be better?

Issue 3: Performance Reviews are too one-sided and vunerable to bias.

I mean, yeah. Co-sign. It’s true. I really, strongly encourage a foundation of solid manager training to clarify how an organization thinks about and measures performance and what the goals are for the performance review process. This helps ensure that managers are at least kind of sort of coming from the same place. However – people are people! A manager may have an employee he or she doesn’t fully understand and therefore can’t effectively motivate, or someone they were so initially impressed by during interviews that they now have trouble seeing performance short comings.

Solution: Solicit Outside Feedback

You don’t have to have a full, written 360 review on every person in the org – however, managers should consult at least 2 or 3 key stakeholders to get a fuller picture of how their team member is bringing value to the organization.

issue 4: employees leave performance review conversations uninspired at best, and demotivated at worst

Call me crazy, but I think it’s possible for an employee to leave a performance conversation feeling excited and motivated. When done well, performance conversations can and should get people stoked to take on new challenges and continue to develop. They should give us perspective that feels helpful, rather than a list of the wrongs we’ve committed throughout the year. Often performance reviews serve as the entirety of a manager’s evidence for a promotion, a raise, or – uh oh – a termination. This is, in a word, whack. Another very strong argument for moving to more check ins per year is that it helps effectively decouple compensation changes from performance conversations – and makes it easier for managers to give hard or critical feedback to employees they work with daily and probably like. It moves away from the performative “we have to give HR good reasons to fire/promote/retain this person” (like that’s up to us anyway!) and towards outcome focused feedback.

Solution: Future Focused Conversations

Yes, there should definitely be discussion on successes and short comings from the previous time period. However, if you are doing the rest of the year right – you are discussing those failures with your team member in real time, as they occur. If anything, in these “bow on top” documented check-ins, managers should be utilizing those misses to draw up common themes – how do these isolated events demonstrate maybe a larger pattern of behavior? The good, the bad, and the ugly of the previous year – or quarter, if I’ve convinced you – is behind us, and there is no changing those events. There’s only next time, and what we can do differently. So in that, keep these conversations focused on desired outcomes and future behaviors. If a manager is familiar with the ambitions and goals of a team member, finding a way for those desired behaviors gets them closer to their ambitions is even more impactful. The goal here is that the employee leaves the conversation with more tools for success than when they come in.

What Managers Can Do Now to Have a Better Performance Review Experience in 2025

• Revisit Your 1:1s. If you aren’t meeting with your people 1:1 on a weekly or at least biweekly basis… I don’t know what to tell you. You have too many people, probably. These 1:1s are often focused on status updates, but can serve as an excellent touch point to deep dive into work product and provide guidance and feedback. Additionally, use this time to get to know your team members individually, especially as it relates to their professional goals and motivation.
• Set up a structured check in document. It can be incredibly simple: in an excel sheet, every row is a month of the year and the columns are categories: Wins, Misses, Focuses for Next Month. Boom! Now you have an incredible resource for that end of year button. Even better – share it with your team member (gasp!) for increased transparency and accountability.
• Build a Continuous Feedback Habit. If I was a more confrontational person, this bullet point would have been: Don’t be a baby and avoid the hard conversations. Luckily, I am a consummate professional and would never accuse colleagues of being scaredy cat babies who are too anxious to give hard feedback in the moment. Okay, I’m kidding! Mostly. It is scary, and the best way to make it less scary is to get more practice. If I could snap my fingers and bestow one skill on every manager – this would be it. It’s that important. When something goes wrong, a report is misfiled, a presentation is flubbed, a deadline is missed – call your employee up, or pull them into your office and have the conversation then and there.
• Become BFFs with Your HRBP. I am *mostly* joking. However, HR practitioners are experts in aligning human behavior to business outcomes – which is exactly what managers are trying to accomplish with any performance process. If you want help preparing for that scary conversation, or structuring your 1:1s – I bet your HRBP would be thrilled to dig into that with you. For most of us, working proactively with managers to build healthy, high performing teams is the highlight of the gig!