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News Articles About Continuous Performance Management

Our news page is a summary of recent articles, white papers, and industry news about the fast moving topic of Continuous Performance Management. We add to this content frequently, so you can find the newest information and historical articles in one place. If you’re aware of information that you feel we should add to this resource, please let us know about it.  The content is organized by date with the most recent at the top of the page.

HR Technology Disruptions for 2017: Nine Trends Reinventing the HR Software Market

Bersin by Deloitte, January 2017. HR technology is undergoing one of the most disruptive periods it has seen in a decade. http://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/0217/pages/9-hr-tech-trends-for-2017.aspx

The Performance Management Revolution

Harvard Business Review, October 2016. Rethinking performance management is at the top of many executive teams’ agendas, but what drove the change in this direction? http://hbr.org/2016/10/the-performance-management-revolution

In corporate America, women fall behind early and continue to lose ground with every step

Women in the Workplace 2016 Study, September 2016. Despite asking for informal feedback as often as men do, women report they receive it less frequently. Moreover, there appears to be a disconnect in the way managers convey difficult feedback. Most managers say they rarely hesitate to give difficult feedback to both women and men, but women report they receive it less frequently. http://leanin.org/news-inspiration/wiw-2016

The End of Annual Performance Reviews: Are the Alternatives Any Better?

Knowledge@Wharton, September 19, 2016. The best companies have shifted to conversations with workers that occur much more frequently than once a year, are less focused on the past and more on the future, and involve continuous adjusting of goals. These firms also are giving managers the skills to be coaches rather than task masters. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-end-of-annual-performance-reviews/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2016-09-20

What If Performance Reviews Lasted All Year?

Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2016. Led by bell cows like Adobe and General Electric, companies are questioning the orthodoxy of annual performance reviews. It’s a stampeding trend that is likely to fundamentally alter the way that employees are evaluated and compensated. The headlines proclaim that companies are “abolishing” performance reviews, but in most cases they are actually substituting a more flexible approach for rigid systems of company-wide deadlines and standardized decision criteria. This idea has considerable merit. Here are five advantages: http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2016/09/18/what-if-performance-reviews-lasted-all-year/

Morgan Stanley to Rate Employees With Adjectives, Not Numbers

New York Times, June 2, 2016. For years, Morgan Stanley employees were graded in part on a numerical scale that rated them from 1 to 5.  Now, the Wall Street firm plans to change those evaluations — by taking away the numbers. Morgan Stanley told its staff on Thursday that it was overhauling how employees are assessed in several ways, including by discarding the number scale in favor of lists of up to five adjectives. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/03/business/dealbook/morgan-stanley-to-rate-employees-with-adjectives-not-numbers.html?_r=1

Goldman Sachs overhauls performance reviews

CNN Money, May 27, 2016. Following a growing trend among big companies, Goldman Sachs announced Thursday that it was ditching its 9-point rating system for performance evaluations in favor of “qualitative” feedback that is “timely” and “constructive.” http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/26/pf/goldman-sachs-performance-reviews/

Goodbye annual review, see ya performance ratings

CNN Money, September 25, 2015. Yet at the end of it all you have a stilted, scripted conversation with your boss, in which you learn you’re a “3” because you “met expectations.” This, despite all your manager’s happy talk during the year. So goes the perpetually weird ritual known as the “annual review” that rates and ranks workers across a company.  The good news: Companies are starting to get just how ineffective the practice is when it comes to spurring better performance, retaining talent and boosting morale. http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/25/pf/annual-review/?xid=nl_powersheet

Feedback Is The Killer App: A New Market and Management Model Emerges

Forbes, August 25, 2015. A new market has emerged: Employee feedback apps for the corporate marketplace. These tools are powerful and disruptive, and they have the potential to redefine how we manage our organizations. http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2015/08/26/employee-feedback-is-the-killer-app-a-new-market-emerges/#287566d36626

More U.S. companies moving away from traditional performance reviews

Washington Post, August 17, 2015. Lately a small but growing number of major U.S. companies, including Accenture, Adobe and Gap, have been saying goodbye to an annual rite of corporate life that employees and managers both love to hate: the traditional performance review.   Now General Electric, long considered Corporate America’s bellwether for management practices, is joining their ranks by piloting a big shift in the way it handles evaluations. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/more-us-companies-moving-away-from-traditional-performance-reviews/2015/08/17/d4e716d0-4508-11e5-846d-02792f854297_story.html

Why GE had to kill its annual performance reviews after more than three decades

Quartz, August 13, 2015. The annual performance review has been a ubiquitous and generally loathed fixture of the corporate world for decades. But haters can rejoice: It’s finally starting to topple. The best part? Even the company that popularized the toughest form of formal annual review is moving away from them. http://qz.com/428813/ge-performance-review-strategy-shift/

Here’s why GE is replacing performance reviews with an app

Fortune, August 13, 2015. General Electric is getting rid of annual performance reviews in favor of app-based feedback. GE managers used to meet with employees once a year, rank them, and fire the bottom 10%. But many firms have been moving away from that practice, which GE Head of Human Resources Susan Peters told Quartz has “become more a ritual than moving the company upwards and forwards.” Managers are GE will now give more constant feedback about their employees’ work through an app called PD@GE,” which stands for “performance development at GE.” Employees will have a concrete list of short-term goals to work towards, while managers are expected to hold frequent discussions about employees’ progress. Employees can also use the app to request feedback at any time. http://fortune.com/2015/08/13/performance-reviews/

GE’s Real-Time Performance Development

Harvard Business Review, August 2015. As managers in a large, complex organization at GE, we face a daily challenge:  ensure that our employees collaborate, make quick and effective business decisions, and provide our customers with superior products and services. But like at other companies, our teams and departments tend to focus on their piece of the business — siloed behavior that causes frustration and impedes broader aims. To cultivate empowered, collaborative, cross-functional teams, we have been experimenting with a new approach to performance development. Our teams were among the first to adopt it as part of a pilot, and we have used it to drive a fivefold productivity increase in the past 12 months. GE is now rolling it out throughout the company, and it will replace our legacy Employee Management System (EMS) by the end of 2016. http://hbr.org/2015/08/ges-real-time-performance-development

In big move, Accenture will get rid of annual performance reviews and rankings

The Washington Post, July 21, 2015. As of September, one of the largest companies in the world will do all of its employees and managers an enormous favor: It will get rid of the annual performance review. Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme told The Washington Post that the professional services firm, which employs hundreds of thousands of workers in cities around the globe, has been quietly preparing for this “massive revolution” in its internal operations.  “Imagine, for a company of 330,000 people, changing the performance management process—it’s huge,” Nanterme said. “We’re going to get rid of probably 90 percent of what we did in the past.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2015/07/21/in-big-move-accenture-will-get-rid-of-annual-performance-reviews-and-rankings/

Why Accenture is saying goodbye to annual performance reviews

LinkedIn post by Pierre Nanterme, Chairman and CEO, Accenture. Of all the things that may keep a CEO up at night—including me—attracting and retaining the best people is high on the list. In an age where millennials dominate the workforce and digital has transformed the workplace, the old ways of employee engagement simply don’t cut it. Millennials are the embodiment of today’s real-time world, getting everything they need to know instantly from their social media networks and digital devices. Our job as leaders is to create the right environment for this new generation to flourish in their careers—we shouldn’t expect them to adjust to the status quo. And nowhere is this more true than in the area of performance management. This is why Accenture has taken a bold step of saying good-bye to annual performance reviews. http://www.careerpaths.it/10-accenture-saying-goodbye-annual-performance-reviews/

Reinventing Performance Management

Harvard Business Review, April 2015. At Deloitte we’re redesigning our performance management system. This may not surprise you. Like many other companies, we realize that our current process for evaluating the work of our people – and then training them, promoting them, and paying them accordingly – is increasingly out of step with our objectives. http://hbr.org/2015/04/reinventing-performance-management

This Is Why Some Microsoft Employees Still Fear The Controversial ‘Stack Ranking’ Employee Review System

Business Insider, August 27, 2014. This is the first time in years that employee reviews will not be based on a curved scale that ranks employees against each other. Microsoft officially killed that old system, known as “stack ranking” in November. http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-old-employee-review-system-2014-8

Kill Your Performance Ratings

Strategy+business, August 8, 2014. Evidence is mounting that conventional approaches to strategic human capital management are broken. This is particularly true for performance management (PM) systems—the appraisal approaches in which employees (working with their managers) set goals for the year; managers interview others who have worked with them and write up an appraisal; employees are rated and ranked numerically; and salary, bonus, and promotion opportunities are awarded accordingly. http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00275?gko=c442b

Adobe: Building Momentum by Abandoning Annual Performance Reviews for “Check-Ins”

Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2014. In 2012, software company Adobe Systems transitioned from using annual performance reviews to a system of ongoing, flexible, “check-ins.” The check-ins involved setting and tracking expectations, ongoing feedback and coaching, and opportunities for growth. The case reviews the deficiencies in the traditional annual review system, the philosophy underlying the change, and its relationship to Adobe’s corporate strategy. http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/adobe-building-momentum-abandoning-annual-performance-reviews-check

How Netflix Reinvented HR

Harvard Business Review, January-February 2014. Sheryl Sandberg has called it one of the most important documents ever to come out of Silicon Valley. It’s been viewed more than 5 million times on the web. But when Reed Hastings and I (along with some colleagues) wrote a PowerPoint deck explaining how we shaped the culture and motivated performance at Netflix, where Hastings is CEO and I was chief talent officer from 1998 to 2012, we had no idea it would go viral. We realized that some of the talent management ideas we’d pioneered, such as the concept that workers should be allowed to take whatever vacation time they feel is appropriate, had been seen as a little crazy (at least until other companies started adopting them). But we were surprised that an unadorned set of 127 slides—no music, no animation—would become so influential. http://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr