Why are performance reviews so onerous?
One of the reasons is that many company schemes have been developed over time and with lots of different inputs. New managers bring in favourite bits from their old company’s scheme and add those to the original. Someone reads a book on competencies or hears on the grapevine of other ways to record information and these are added to the mix. Eventually any scheme will just buckle under the weight of documentation. And how do they try to sort it? Often by putting it all online or on the company intranet and the system then separates from reality and the people doomed to run it. It recreates itself as it blossoms and grows. A major shock to this organic method of getting an appraisal system was the recent introduction of competencies. Wow! More to measure and more to score. It’s not difficult to see why people find appraisals so unpopular. And when people question why they don’t deliver improved performance it time to bring in someone from outside. I had two interesting dilemmas with two
