The case against the annual performance review was strong and largely correct. It compressed a year into a single anxious conversation, it was distorted by whatever happened in the preceding six weeks, it consumed enormous administrative effort, and the ratings it produced were more consistent within a manager than across a company.
So a great many organisations abolished it, and announced that feedback would instead be continuous. That was the right instinct and it contained a hidden assumption: that continuous feedback is a thing which occurs, rather than a system somebody has to build.
Continuous means nobody scheduled it
Where the replacement was built deliberately — a documented cadence, a written record, a defined moment when pay and progression are decided — it works better than what it replaced, and the people inside it can tell you where they stand.
Where it was not, the ritual simply stopped. Employees describe going twelve months with no structured conversation about performance at all. Managers who were uncomfortable delivering criticism once a year turn out to be no more comfortable delivering it weekly, and in the absence of a forcing function they deliver it never. The feedback that does arrive is positive and incidental, which is pleasant and tells nobody anything.
Two groups lose most. New joiners, because they have the least context for calibrating themselves and the highest need for correction early, which is the same reason the first ninety days decide the next three years. And anyone whose work is not visible to the person deciding their pay, which in a flattened organisation is most people — a manager with too many reports cannot form an independent view of each, and defaults to the loudest signal available. That is the span of control problem again, surfacing as an evaluation failure rather than a supervision one.
Documentation is the part that gets missed until it is needed. An organisation with no written record of performance cannot defend a dismissal, cannot explain a promotion that was passed over, and cannot answer a question about pay with anything except assertion — which is untenable now that pay transparency has changed what managers are allowed to say. The paperwork everyone resented was also the evidence.
What the organisations that got this right have in common is that they kept a decision point. They may have dropped the numerical rating, the forced distribution and the self-assessment essay, and they retained one scheduled, documented conversation a year in which somebody says plainly how it is going. That is a much smaller ritual than the one abolished, and it is the load-bearing part.
Topics leadershipmanagement
