Why we should focus on performance achievement rather than performance appraisal?

Actus™ CEO Lucinda Carney was invited to speak at a conference on the subject of performance appraisal earlier this month, a topic you may have noticed has been at the centre of HR maelstrom recently. The big firms like Microsoft, Deloitte, and Adobe have announced that they are ditching their performance appraisal processes. Now, the fact that the rejection of the performance appraisal is actually a dose of the ‘emperor’s new clothes’ doesn’t detract from the fact that the annual appraisal, commonly known as the performance review, is fatally flawed.

The annual performance appraisal is widely hated; in some places so much so that having no appraisal at all has been found to be more effective! Why is that? Well, we believe that that the clue is in the term ‘review’: waiting until the end of the year to give someone feedback on their performance to date is akin to the golf coach waiting until the 18th hole to tell you what you did wrong on the 1st, 2nd or 3rd tee.