5 Reasons to Eliminate the Self-Review | The Talent Strategy Group

Before the pandemic, many organizations had made adjustments to their performance management (PM) approaches to reflect new workplace dynamics. Despite these improvements, the pandemic has generated new opportunities to reimagine PM once again. And as firms optimize their PM while eliminating unnecessary complexity (or enabling simplicity), this article identifies one opportunity for doing so: eliminating self-reviews.  It provides five reasons–supported by the science–on how self-reviews are not worth the time and emotion invested by employees, and can introduce bias, give cover to poor managers and create unrealistic expectations in employees. Among the points are that employees are the least accurate observers of their performance with lower-performing employees over-rating themselves and the very highest-performing employees under-rating themselves. Building on this point, I believe one way to unlock PM’s potential is by enabling ways (e.g., digital capabilities) to gather more team-based feedback. As work becomes more team-based and interdependent, and managers have less direct visibility into their ‘teams’ day-to-day interactions, high-quality peer input can accelerate and drive improved performance. In any event, even if you are not ready to fully cut self-reviews from your PM, the article has many insights to consider as you evaluate the pros and cons of this decision.