Excellent piece on the performance review on National Public Radio. Essentially UCLA business professor Samuel Culbert lambastes the performance evaluation process and suggest it is time to Shoot the Dog!

Money quote:

This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. Everybody does it, and almost everyone who’s evaluated hates it. It’s a pretentious, bogus practice that produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive should call a corporate plus.

At the same time he does not believe that an employee’s performance should not be evaluated. What he suggests is that it should be done continuously, as a good faith attempt to point staff in the right direction, and help them improve if they need to. Currently, he thinks performance reviews are just seen as a power play by both HR and line managers.

The replacement for the Performance Review is called the Performance Preview. In this process managers are judged by their ability to get the best out of everyone below them. If they are not getting the best out of the subordinate they are required to ask the subordinate what they are looking for in terms of support. So the  boss asks the subordinate what he is doing wrong.

This is a process that continues indefinitely, and not just once a year. More on the website.