Is it Time to Toss Out the Annual Performance Review?

Jennifer L'Estrange
June 30, 2016

We work with several startup companies and many of their founders spent some of their professional lives working for larger corporations before starting their own businesses. They come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, but there are a couple of things that they have in common. One is that they didn’t love having a boss.  The other is that, they hated… or rather loathed… their performance review process. In fact, the whole ‘pay-for-performance’ tag line makes their eyes roll. But the question remains, if we don’t have an annual review of ‘the what and the how’ what do we do instead?  How do we ensure that we reward our top performers and don’t lose control over the payroll budget? If you’re thinking of changing your performance review process, here are a few key questions to help you get the conversation started.

Changing the performance management process is a project.  Start by identifying the business needs that the project will achieve and structure a business case to define the goals, plan and costs for the change.  If you really want a performance management process that works for you, invest the time and effort to implement one that meets your company’s unique organisational, cultural, and financial requirements.

Additional reading:

McKinsey Quarterly
Washington Post
Forbes
CIO Magazine

 

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A commercial roofing contractor was in hyper growth mode. They had goals to increase their field workforce to expand their service area to additional states and geographical locations. If they were to grow their field workforce, they would also need to increase their administrative, operational and sales headcount to support the additional workload created by increased field work. Additionally, they were challenged in workforce retention and development, experiencing high turnover, and did not have a dedicated Human Resources professional to manage employee relations and compliance issues that come with trying to scale a business.

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