It’s time for the annual performance review process: managers are wracking their brains to complete all of the paperwork; employees are stressed out thinking about how to condense a whole year of accomplishments into a few sentences and a 30-minute conversation, and HR is languishing in deadlines and details to ensure the entire process goes off successfully.
The performance review system, as it stands today, is broken. Employee engagement rates are abysmal, hovering around 30% according to Gallup research, and part of the reason for that is employees simply aren't getting the substance they need from managers during performance reviews.
So what do employees need from performance reviews?
We want information and we want it immediately. Whether it's our phones buzzing with a Facebook notification letting us know it's a friend from middle school's birthday, or a pop-up on our computers telling us we have a text message, we live in an always-on world.
Why then is the workplace falling so far behind?