6 Powerful Alternatives to Performance Reviews You Should Try

As many employees will tell you, how management handles performance reviews has a huge impact on everything from employee wellbeing to daily engagement at work. In fact, research shows that managerial prowess accounts for 70% of the variance between highly engaged and consistently disengaged teams.

Many employees, young and old, are looking for opportunities to learn, grow, and develop, so it's important for managers to take a step back and evaluate current performance management methods.

If you’re still relying on the traditional once-a-year performance review as your sole opportunity to provide feedback, you may be missing out on a chance to engage employees in a more meaningful growth process.

What Are the Drawbacks of Traditional Performance Reviews?

While traditional performance reviews have been the go-to for many years, it’s important to recognize that the model does have drawbacks:

Delayed Timing

Often, too much time passes between the time an issue (or an improvement) shows up and when it’s addressed with the employee. How can a manager hold an employee accountable for something that happened a year ago?

It can be challenging to remember all that happens in the span of a year, and a fuzzy memory can make problems hard to address.

Bringing something up a year after it happens—good or bad—can also make it seem trivial and unimportant, which means the feedback loses meaning to the employee. If it wasn’t a big enough issue to address it when it happened, why do so now?

Focus on the Past (Not the Future)

The traditional performance review also takes away the employee’s opportunity to correct their issues and see quick and continuous progress. Yearly performance reviews also tend to be centered on what happened in the past. This puts the focus on mistakes instead of goals, which is yet another factor that can lead to a lack of motivation.

Lack of Two-Way Feedback

A yearly performance review is hardly ever a two-way street and doesn’t really make space for employees to give feedback to the manager. Because of this, managers rarely know whether their feedback is helpful or valuable until the next evaluation happens a year later.

Misplaced Focus

Traditional performance reviews are usually tied to compensation and promotions, which means employees typically want to get something out of it other than advice on how to improve at work. This takes the focus away from goals and outcomes, which should really be the center of all coaching conversations managers have with employees.

6 Alternatives to Traditional Performance Reviews

Research by Gartner reveals that 59% of employees are not performing at an optimal level. Still, only 29% of managers feel their current performance management systems are effective. Clearly, something needs to change when it comes to performance reviews.

If traditional, infrequent performance reviews are out, it’s important for you to have a more robust feedback system to replace them. If you aren’t sure where to start, here are a few ideas to help you empower your employees to find success in the workplace.

Quarterly Check-Ins

Employees need more feedback opportunities than a yearly review provides. If you want to keep your normal performance review structure, one option to give more frequent feedback is to simply make it a quarterly meeting.

Instead of solely focusing on past mistakes, this gives the employee ample time to set goals, make changes, and see progress before their big performance review at the end of the year. This, in turn, helps you build a solid foundation of trust and support with your employees.

Regular One-on-One Coaching

Trading in yearly performance reviews for weekly one-on-one coaching meetings allows you to create a culture of continuous feedback in your organization so that employees know you care about seeing them improve.

These meetings give employees a chance to look back on their wins and losses from the week and get help with learning how to overcome obstacles to optimal performance. They can then apply that feedback the very next week and see immediate results, which will help keep them motivated.

Career Development Mentoring

Sixty-three percent of Gen Z employees say that skill development is essential to their definition of career success. Additionally, nearly 40% of them say that mentorship is very valuable to them.

Consequently, it may be a good idea to consider centering your performance improvement meetings around an employee’s career path, helping them understand what they need to work on to achieve their professional objectives. This approach can motivate employees to improve now while they work toward their future goals.

Two-Way Feedback Meetings

Building trust with employees means allowing them to provide you with feedback as well. Employees need to be able to express when something you’re doing is frustrating them or hindering their progress. This information, in turn, helps you better meet their needs and improve your coaching practice.

Additionally, employees are more likely to be open to hearing what you have to say when they feel they work in a culture of mutual care.

Project-Based Reflections

A project-based approach to performance management gives you an easy system for delivering feedback. Employees are more likely to remember the details of their performance right after the project is over.

Focusing on the project itself also gives you and the employee a concrete point of reference when discussing points of praise or opportunities for improvement. The employee then gets the chance to apply that concrete feedback and set new goals to improve processes and outcomes as you head into the next project.

Self-Evaluation Performance Review

Self-evaluation is one of the best tools for performance management. This is because employees need to develop the ability to see and evaluate their own mistakes and develop action plans to improve.

The better your employees get at this, the more adept they’ll be at correcting issues in real time, even before a manager says anything. This self-reflection process truly allows employees to manage their own progress and take the initiative to get better.

An Adaptable Approach to Managing Employee Performance

Effective performance improvement is about more than just telling employees what they did wrong or what they need to do to earn a raise. Pushing your employees to do their best requires consistent check-ins and conversations centered around future goals.

When you invest the time and effort to change how you coach employees, you—and the business—will be rewarded with improved employee performance and, in turn, better business outcomes.