Few office workers seem to like performance reviews, and many seem to outright hate – or fear – them.
A 2015 survey of Fortune 1000 companies found that nearly two-thirds of employees were dissatisfied with performance reviews, didn’t think they were relevant to their jobs – or both.
And that was during the much simpler pre-pandemic times, when pretty much all professional workers were in the office daily and could be assessed similarly. Things are trickier today, as some employees work entirely from home, others come to the office and still others split their time between the two.
Here are three challenges that I believe employers and their employees will face and ways to overcome them.
Familiarity gap. One of the biggest challenges involves the difficulty of creating a connection with your boss.
Employees who share the same physical space as their managers will have more opportunities to interact with them. This gives officegoers a leg up over those in a remote or hybrid setup.
The more familiar we are with other people, the more we tend to like them. And research has found that how much a manager likes you can have a significant impact on their evaluation of you.
The best way to even the playing field is by making it easier for workers to interact with their bosses when they’re working remotely. Employers can do this by scheduling short but frequent check-ins or providing virtual office hours when managers are available.
Another strategy is creating always-on chatrooms. To encourage more social interactions, companies can bring back the Zoom happy hours that became popular during the pandemic.
Fewer observations. I teach my students that the most accurate performance ratings are obtained when reviews are based on observable behaviors rather than subjective evaluations of traits.
This is because while it is possible to define and standardize behaviors and to train raters on how to observe and rate them, traits are subjective.
The problem is that observing behaviors is difficult when employees are working remotely. One way to address this is for employers to adopt a results-based system, in which employees are evaluated based on productivity metrics such as client satisfaction, sales volume or number of units produced.
Shifting the focus of performance appraisal from behaviors to results for all employees ensures that managers do not have to worry about being unable to observe their direct reports on the job.
One other option that can help rate workers evenly is by applying tracking technology – though this can be controversial and problematic, for example by eroding employee privacy and creating more stress.
It’s vital to implement these systems right – for example, by being extremely transparent regarding what is being tracked and what data is being collected.
One review to rule them all. Alas, performance reviews based on results may not work for every job.
The key thing here is to use only one type of review system for all employees. Evaluating employees by different standards may create fairness and even legal concerns if doing so might lead to different outcomes for groups explicitly protected from discrimination.
At the end of the day, an employer should use a type of evaluation that can effectively measure any employee’s performance. If judging on results doesn’t work, an organization could try a behavior-based system but revise it so that it doesn’t favor employees working in the office. Another system is competencies reviews, the most popular type, which assess employees on competencies such as attention to detail, timeliness and quality of work.
Performance reviews should be fair and not put anyone – such as those working primarily from home – at a disadvantage.
Yalcin Acikgoz is an associate professor of psychology at Appalachian State University. Distributed by The Associated Press.
