Posted by Daniel Welch

As the end of the year approaches, it’s time for many in the working world to begin performance reviews - those annual rites of awkward conversations, hurried evaluation forms and vague, one-sentence clichés (”He’s a real team player”) that too often do little to achieve their purported goal: to bring to light the strengths and weaknesses of the employee and the surrounding work environment so the next year can be better than the current.

Most of us have been on one end or the other of performance reviews, which means it’s more than likely that your experience left something to be desired.

As today’s Wall Street Journal notes, one of the fundamental problems with performance reviews is the fear of responsibility. If you write something negative about an employee, you better do your part to remedy the problem. And if you write positives, you better be willing to offer a reward, or else explain why there is no reward. Too often the result is a muddle of vague generalities and slightly above-average marks.

Disturbingly, a genre of books has gained popularity that provide “plug-and-play comments” for performance reviews, as the Journal notes. In so doing, these books summarize most of what is wrong with too many performance reviews: they rely on canned comments and disingenuous evaluations to preserve the very thing they’re supposed to reject — the status quo.

Most of us have probably shared the experience: We rush through forms (circling 4 out of 5 on the rubric, since it’s the easiest to avoid explaining), offer some perfunctory comments, and send it to HR.

No doubt we’ve been on the receiving end of these as well, and sat through reviews in which we learned almost nothing about our performance — except about that one person who hates us.

Different companies have different reasons for giving reviews, from avoiding legal liability to giving employees a voice in their career plans. But for too many companies, haphazard reviews are a consequence of poor management — and the time and effort required to have earnest and consistent communication about what is working, and what needs to be improved.

Businesses that rely heavily on performance reviews for personnel decisions would benefit from taking a step back and assessing if the process achieves its goal. If it does not, they should consider a philosophical shift in their approach, and make performance reviews less of an annual chore, and more of a day-to-day management responsibility.