Push to ditch annual staff performance reviews

David Cawley, regional director of accountancy and finance for Hays, says employees benefit more from regular, informal conversations with managers as opposed to traditional annual performance reviews.

“The research tends to show us employees want more regular contact with managers as they want to be able to have more of an informal conversation just to check-in, rather than having to leave it to the formal, once a year,” Mr Cawley said.

“My personal belief is that that is the way forward. I think stockpiling your views and feelings to have that one-on-one session with your direct manager once a year is probably quite archaic.”

Mr Cawley said the “more consultative regular approach is aiding engagement and ... is also identifying development issues and training issues”.

While larger firms tend to implement this strategy effectively, smaller firms that lack the resources to gauge employee-wants risk losing staff.

“The smaller organisations that don’t necessarily have that back office support structure to be able to do that, either don’t have those reviews in place or they are a bit more like the older versions where it’s once a year,” Mr Cawley said.

Trent McLaren, senior business development manager at Intuit, also weighed in, saying that regular reviews across the board “will always show an increase in productivity and efficiency when done properly”.

Mr McLaren said regular reviews also serve a purpose for mangers who have to “performance manage-out” staff members who are “not a good fit” or “not taking on the job”.

“It works both ways. If you’re trying to do performance reviews with someone that’s not doing their job, well, it’s important that you’re doing the monthly communication because you need to be able to track exactly what conversations you had by when,” Mr McLaren said.