Early in my career, I had a manager who scheduled my annual performance review, then canceled it. Then rescheduled it. Then came into the meeting fifteen minutes late, clearly unprepared, and spent most of our time together shuffling through notes, trying to remember what I had actually accomplished over the past twelve months. I walked out feeling invisible — not because the feedback was bad, but because the whole exercise communicated one clear message: this is a formality, not a priority.
Sound familiar?
Performance reviews are one of the most universally dreaded rituals in professional life. Managers dread the paperwork. Employees stress over ratings. And at the end of it all, very little actually changes. A recent Deloitte study found that 61% of managers and 72% of employees don’t completely trust their organization’s performance management systems. That is a staggering number. If nearly three-quarters of your team doesn’t trust the process you’re using to evaluate them, you don’t have a performance management system; you have an anxiety generator with a nice HR template attached.
The good news? This is fixable. And it doesn’t require a budget overhaul or a new software platform. It requires a mindset shift — and a different cadence.
The real problem: You’re doing it once a year
The annual review fails for one fundamental reason: it’s trying to do too much in one shot. It’s asked to evaluate past performance, chart future growth and sometimes deliver compensation news, all in the same conversation. That’s not a review. That’s a pressure cooker.
Harvard Business School Professor Katherine Coffman nails it: “When a review is something that only happens once a year, it can feel very consequential and anxiety-inducing, but if it’s happening on a more regular basis, it makes the stakes for any one of these conversations feel a bit lower.”
Lower stakes. More honest conversations. Actual growth. That’s the goal.
When feedback only flows once a year, people stop trusting the process, and they stop being honest in it. Employees craft self-assessments designed to protect them, not grow them. Managers default to recency bias, rating people on what happened last month instead of the full year. And because so much rides on one conversation, everyone shows up armored instead of open.
Compare that to a team where feedback is a standing habit. Where nothing in the formal review is a surprise, because the important conversations have already happened. Where the annual review feels less like a verdict and more like a recap.
That’s not a fantasy; that’s what happens when leaders build a year-round feedback culture.
What this looks like in practice
Adobe cracked this early. They shifted from traditional annual reviews to an ongoing process called “Check-in,” a less structured, two-way conversation between employees and managers focused on career growth. The result was a 30% increase in employee engagement, reduced turnover and a notable improvement in morale.
Thirty percent. From changing the rhythm of feedback, not the content.
Betterworks’ 2024 State of Performance Enablement report found that employees who receive ongoing feedback are three times more likely to feel they can perform their work well and are significantly more likely to see a career development path within the organization.
Three times more likely to feel capable and clear on where they’re going. If you’re a leader, that number should stop you in your tracks.
4 things leaders can do right now
1. Build a feedback rhythm and protect it.
Block fifteen minutes every two weeks with each direct report. Keep it informal. This isn’t another meeting you both dread. Ask three questions: What’s going well? What’s getting in the way? What do you need from me? That’s it. Done consistently, these conversations become the foundation on which everything else is built.
2. Document as you go.
One of the most painful parts of annual reviews is the archaeology, digging through a year’s worth of emails and Slack messages trying to reconstruct who did what. Instead, keep a running note for each team member. Jot observations after big projects, tough conversations or standout moments. When review time comes, you’re not excavating — you’re summarizing. Your reviews will be more accurate, fairer and approximately 100 times less stressful.
3. Separate the compensation conversation from the development conversation.
These two discussions should not live in the same meeting. When pay is on the table, people stop listening to feedback. They’re doing math in their heads. Decouple them. Let development breathe on its own. Your people will engage more honestly, and so will you.
4. Make the formal review a summary, not a surprise.
If something significant comes up in your year-round check-ins, a performance issue, a growth opportunity, a concern, address it then, not eleven months later. By the time the annual review arrives, your team member should be able to predict almost everything you’re going to say, because you’ve already been saying it. The best review any leader can give is one where the employee nods and says, “Yes, that matches what I’ve been hearing.”
Why this matters more than you think
When people feel stuck in an organization and don’t know how to get to where they want to go, that’s a recipe for losing them. And right now, in a market where talent is mobile and options are plentiful, “stuck” is expensive.
The performance review isn’t going away, nor should it. A formal touchpoint has real value. But its value depends entirely on what’s happening in the other fifty-one weeks of the year. Without that foundation, even the most well-intentioned review falls into the noise.
Your people don’t need another form. They need a manager who shows up consistently, pays attention and makes feedback feel like care rather than surveillance.
That’s the kind of leader people don’t leave.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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