Ready for one of the best presents you’ve had in years? Here it is: I absolve you of ever having to do another employee annual review for the rest of your management life. Here’s why.

What’s The Point?

Do me a favor. Take a piece of paper and pen and jot down all the goals you hope to accomplish by doing annual reviews for your employees. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Got them all down? Does the list look something like this?

Check in with an employee to see how he or she is doing
Explore ways how you can facilitate greater engagement and professional development
Give him or her goals
Document progress (or lack thereof)
Justify a wage increase (or not)
Help him or her to improve

Now, I’d like to ask you a question: Is it working?

Annual Reviews, A Personal Retrospective

Obviously, I have strong feelings on the matter. Before becoming a manager, I remember sitting on the receiving side of annual reviews fuming. My thoughts weren’t, “Why thank you for taking the time to illuminate some of my faults for me!” They were more along the lines of, “Have you considered taking some of your own advice?”

I’m embarrassed to tell you that as a manager I continued the tradition of annual reviews at my hospital despite any evidence that my ‘review’ of an employee’s performance was met with anything more than resignation or worse, resentment. With time, I collected a long list or reasons to question the value of annual reviews:

They required hours of time and thought, Reviews took me hours to prepare and then usually required another hour or two of time to run the finished product past my supervisor for additional input.
They were shamefully transparent. However hard I tried, I felt like everyone involved saw right through the format. They seemed like a long preamble to a discussion about money. Then to add insult to injury, they were built like a compliment sandwich, with a thick slice of s&*t in the middle. They went something like this:

“Wow, Sally, what a great year you’ve had with us.

Unfortunately a lot of your coworkers think you’re not a team player.

But hey, you’re always on time for work. Way to go!”

I had no training. After years of making employees suffer through my annual reviews, I had a horrible realization. No one on my management team, not the owner, nor any of the doctors, and least of all me, had ever been trained on how to do reviews, had agreed on the purpose of annual reviews, or had figured out how to measure their effectiveness.
There were no measurable goals. Short of trying to justify a wage increase, what were reviews trying to accomplish? Change in behavior? When I looked back, I couldn’t think of a single example where we succeeded at making a lasting change in behavior.
They were hypocritical. How could I defend our company’s insistence that employees were ‘are our most valuable asset’ when I was waiting a whole year to check in with how they were fairing with our company?
They were unintentionally demoralizing. Since I knew that employees anticipated a raise at the end of the review, I always felt like the review had to be sufficiently critical to justify the small wage increase that I was to spring on them in the end. Consequently, the talk wasn’t uplifting, it was defeating and came with the added humiliation of a 25-cent raise in the end.
They had bulls%$t premises built into them. Remember when they told you that they had to include a improvement plan for the employee? Or a career path? I was supposed to help the employee layout a trajectory not just for their careers at our hospital, but for their lives. Me. The guy who was fostering 6 cats and a dog with kidney disease. If I was supposed to be these employees’ chance for a life coach, they would have been better off getting a new life.

$1000

$1000.00 referral fee for veterinarian applicants. Sign on bonuses also available. More.

Don’t Take My Word For It

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Numerous papers have been written on the topic. I’ve compiled a list to make of the most recent articles to give you a jump start on your own research. A scan of the titles will tell you that others have drawn similar conclusions about annual reviews.

More Harm Than Good: The Truth About Performance Reviews: Gallup, May 2019

Is The Annual Review Dead? SHRM, August 2015

The Performance Management Revolution, Harvard Business Review, 2016

Annual Reviews Don’t Work-Here’s Why, SyncHR 2020

Performance Reviews are Pointless and Insulting, Forbes 2014

Annual Performance Review Bows Out, SHRM,2021

Performance Reviews are Dead, INC 2021

Alternatives

Annual reviews are so entrenched in our management thinking, that if I were to tell you we should stop doing them, your knee jerk response might be, “But what do you want me to do instead?” Yet asking about an ‘instead’ implies that the thing we are replacing is worth replacing in the first place. In most cases, I would argue that’s not true. Annual reviews likely have no place in most veterinary hospitals for all kinds of reasons that I’ll let you explore on your own.

Still, for those of you needing to wean yourself away from annual reviews more slowly, consider the following. It may help you improve while you consider whether to keep reviews long term.

Determine Your Goals. What do you want to accomplish? Change employee behavior? Motivate an employee? Demonstrate concern? Explain a change in salary? Write your goals down and then do some research online as to how other businesses have succeeded in this area.

Consider the Efficacy of a Write Up or Threats of Termination: In my career, I have been motivated both by threats of termination and write ups, but I never left the meetings happy about it. Nor do I think that was the best way to change my behavior. True, it got my attention, but smacking a dog for peeing on the floor gets the dog’s attention too; it doesn’t mean it’s the best way to stop the dog from inappropriately urinating. If the ‘three strikes’ rule is in your coaching playbook, consider how many games you’ve won with the strategy and tweak things accordingly.

Go In With The Intent Of Growing A Relationship: You can’t change an employee’s behavior; the best you can do is to inspire him or her to change. Go into the meeting with three goals and a plan to: 1) listen to the person’s thoughts and position on whatever topic is at hand 2) demonstrate that you care about him or her and 3) express your belief that the individual can and should change, for his or her own benefit and the benefit of the practice.

Consider How Your Efforts Can Be Measured. By trying to determine whether your ‘review’ efforts can be measured and how to measure them, you’ll build a review system that’s more likely to return tangible results.

Provide Feedback In Real Time. If there are any employees out there that like reviews, they are probably workers that want acknowledgement and affirmation by their supervisor. Stop making them wait for a whole year. Watch and praise them in real time.

Review The Team, Not The Individual. When you think about it, it’s silly to review a single member of a veterinary practice, since so much of our work is predicated on how well the others that we work with are doing their jobs. Why not review the entire team’s efforts? Agree on 6 main goals for every client/patient experience, then spend 3 days in one month assessing how the entire group achieves these goals. Don’t you think that discussion will ultimately be more productive in fixing broken systems and making lasting, positive changes to performance?

Be Creative. Management comes with a lot of weighty responsibility. Mete out the more difficult aspects of management with a powerful infusion of creativity and fun. Helping each other work together more happily and successfully doesn’t have to be hard, indeed it’s what you’re all trying to achieve. Let your imagination sit behind the desk for awhile. Success doesn’t have to come at the expense of joy.