Would abolishing annual performance reviews be a good idea??

[Hyndis]

Our reviews are a joke. They really are. It's just sit down once a year with a member of the HR team and chat.

There's no comeback for anything in the review feedback from your colleagues. If you did crap, you're either shuffled off to an easier job (usually not involving the feedback sessions, actually), or it's ignored.

Sounds great, right? Heh - try being an overperformer, knowing that serial underperformers and incompetents are going to be rewarded with easier work.

Rapscallion

Standard operating procedure.

Oh, and if you dare slack off so you're no longer doing 300% the work expected of you, you'll of course be torn a new one. Meanwhile, the slackers just keep on slacking, doing barely any work at all and getting more compensation for it.

[blas]

At my work, we argued that since our raises have always been related to our reviews (the better the review, the better the raise), that if we were not going to be getting raises this year or that year, that we should not have reviews. It only makes sense.

Of course, the idiots in suits didn't agree with that.

[Rapscallion]

Oh, and if you dare slack off so you're no longer doing 300% the work expected of you, you'll of course be torn a new one. Meanwhile, the slackers just keep on slacking, doing barely any work at all and getting more compensation for it.

Aye, running into that right about tomorrow.

Rapscallion

[blas]

Oh no, let's not get started on that one.....

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

That writer had many good points.

I have to agree that annual reviews are useless, especially when people know when they are scheduled. They may be unproductive 49 weeks out of the year and super productive the other 3 weeks before the review. If there have to be annual reviews, spread them out throughout the year so that people don't get complacent.

That was the scenario among the people who had ordering and stocking duties at my former workplace. One person who was notorious for coasting and bitching about everyone else not working hard enough to the manager upped his productivity around the second week of March. Reviews happen around the first week of April.

My first year I got a 5 cent raise. That pissed me off because I work hard and people who didn't work as hard and had the same duties, but sucked up to the manager and were male got a higher raise than I did. I did get a significant raise, 15 cents when I took over ordering a couple months later. The next year after he announced his retirement, everyone got significant raises. That lead us to believe that he didn't actually do reviews. I left in January and from talking to co-workers, some were happy with their raises and others were pissed. Several people got 5 cents (a joke IMO) or nothing at all.

A good manager will keep tabs on everyone all year round and factor that in to performance reviews, but of course we all know how few of those are out there!

I hear you on the 5 cent raise thing. It is insulting. I mean yes it's a raise but the bottom line is a 0.05 raise to someone making $8/hr at a full time job translates to an extra $96/year (before deductions). While that doesn't sound horrible, that also means an increase of $3.69/paycheck So that 5 cent increase basically means I can hit up the Wendy's value menu one extra time every pay period.

If I ran a company, I'd set a minimum raise limit, probably 0.15 or 0.20. Anything lower will probably do more harm than good in the long run.