Why eliminating annual performance reviews will make your job worse

Corporate America is suddenly obsessed with scrapping yearly performance reviews. That's a bad thing.

Long live the performance review?
(Image credit: 2/Identikal/Ocean/Corbis)

Ending yearly performance reviews for white-collar employees is the latest hot trend in management. Accenture, one of the biggest white-shoe consulting firms, shocked the world of white-collar work when it announced last month that it would eliminate annual reviews. And Accenture is now being quickly followed by Deloitte, another mammoth professional services firm and, like dominoes, Adobe, Gap, and even General Electric. Ten percent of Fortune 500 companies are joining in the trend. The dominoes are really falling.

This shift has been almost universally praised. Many BigCo employees think the yearly performance review process is somewhere between suboptimal and a sham. It's viewed as political and privileging some metrics at the expense of others, more or less arbitrarily. Reviews gum up the works, as employees spend the months leading up to them politicking for position instead of doing actual work. Deloitte said what clinched its decision was an internal survey in which 60 percent of employees said they thought yearly performance reviews were useless.

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Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is a writer and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His writing has appeared at Forbes, The Atlantic, First Things, Commentary Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Federalist, Quartz, and other places. He lives in Paris with his beloved wife and daughter.