📝 Workers Might Hate Performance Reviews Less If They Looked Like This

In a new study, Cornell researchers looked at how employees feel about reviews that emphasize qualitative feedback over numerical rankings.

The dreaded performance review draws the ire of employees and managers alike. Workers fret that reviews fail to capture the full scope of their work, or that they are an unfair assessment of their performance. For managers, reviews can be a time-consuming nuisance and involve the challenging task of delivering tough feedback. 

But a new study from Cornell University finds that the structure of the performance review can have a huge impact on how workers feel about them. 

“Even if they’re given kind of average numbers versus wording that says they were very average, it feels more fair if they just see the words and not the numbers,” Zitek says. “So we thought that was very interesting. We were originally expecting the combined feedback to still be viewed positively, but people didn’t like the numbers within that either.”

Over the last decade, a number of companies have revamped their performance reviews, seemingly to address the long-standing pain points. The likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have moved away from numerical ratings, while tech companies like Microsoft eliminated stack rankings (reviews that essentially rank employees against their colleagues) and Adobe eliminated reviews altogether. (More recently, however, tech giants like Google and Meta have actually pushed for more stringent evaluations of employees and, in turn, lower ratings.) 

Read the complete Fast Company article BY Pavithra Mohan: https://www.fastcompany.com/91470690/workers-might-hate-performance-reviews-less-if-they-looked-like-this