Effective Performance Reviews

Many companies perform performance reviews on a yearly basis. In this review you and your manager are required to summarize what are your “improve” , “preserve” and “goals” from the last year following to the next year. In it’s essence this process is wrong, why?

A year is way too long - Our work is so dynamic that your goals and even your managers most probably won’t be the same in the next quarter.

Only your teammates can make you better - but your team is not aware on what you want to improve in.

It’s a company process - it was initiated by the company and not by you, you are the one who is responsible for your future, take it in your hands.

So how can we make performance reviews more effective? make it weekly, share it with your teammates and you are the one who should be responsible on the process. Share every week or so with your team one line of what was good this week and what could be better. For example - “This week I received great feedback for my design” , “This week I’ve arranged an awesome party for the team”, “This week I’ve learnt git” on the other side - “This week I broke the CI” , “This week I missed the ETA by 3 days”.

This process may encourage everyone from the team to write something. If people can’t find a single note to take from an entire week, it means that they weren’t challenged enough by themselves or by their managers in that week. and this means they should seek for new challenges and problems to solve.