Companies Now Remove The Employee Performance Review And Replace It With … Nothing? LOL.

I guess we all knew we were headed here.

5 min readMar 2

I hope, by this point in business evolution, we all realize the standard employee evaluation is a total joke. It’s a farce. It allows lazy, bad managers to hide behind some once-a-year BS. They throw themselves on the cross the entire time — “This so much process! I’m so busy with everything else I do all day!” — and then give a generic review. The review is predominantly a compliment sandwich where the negatives are from seven months prior. The employee had no idea about those negatives at the time, but in the employee evaluation, the grenades come out.

At the end of the mostly-stressful 30 minutes, the employee gets a tiny little raise (“Wish we could do more, Bob! Next year!”) and the manager goes back to digital paper-pushing and crippling the economy. The next time you’ll hear from your boss after the employee evaluation is in two weeks when some no-context email flies into your inbox. It’s a sense of urgency project, though.

Now, what I described above is a little drastic. That is true. My broader point is that the employee evaluation is a classic managerial move. It allows managers to hide behind “this is the only time of year where this conversation is acceptable,” which pretty much murders the idea of organic feedback. Think about it this way. You can grab your phone right now and order a car in what, 3 minutes? But you need to wait another seven months to figure out how things are going at work? That seems questionable.

As a result, some bigger-name companies are ending the idea of standard employee evaluation. GE was a big name that did it, and others are following suit. Maybe the performance review shall die! Goodbye employee evaluation!

The problem: what happens next? Organic feedback?!?!? LOL. What actually happens once you eliminate the employee evaluation is a bigger farce than the evaluation itself.