Modern solution | Annual Performance Reviews are dead, long live the Performance Snapshot!

By Amira Kohler, Innovation Director, Clear Review

For many, the term ‘per­for­mance man­age­ment’ is syn­ony­mous with the dread­ed annu­al per­for­mance appraisal. Many cringe at the term. As quot­ed in a 2019 BBC arti­cle, “annu­al assess­ments can be “wild­ly inac­cu­rate”, even “soul-crush­ing.”

That’s not sur­pris­ing; annu­al per­for­mance reviews (some­times called appraisals) have a num­ber of major flaws. And yet, they still sur­vive — a 2018 sur­vey by the research firm World at Work found that 80% of com­pa­nies still used for­mal per­for­mance reviews. So how have they sur­vived? They remain in place because most organ­i­sa­tions still need the out­comes of the per­for­mance review process, although they’d pre­fer to get these out­comes by a bet­ter method. Step for­ward the ‘Per­for­mance Snap­shot’ – a mod­ern solu­tion to an old prob­lem that has worked for hun­dreds of organ­i­sa­tions using Clear Review tech­nol­o­gy com­bined with a con­tin­u­ous per­for­mance man­age­ment process.

What’s real­ly wrong with per­for­mance reviews?