Annual performance reviews suck. Here’s how to make them better. Or maybe we should just ditch them.

In my several decades as a nonprofit professional, there are a couple of harrowing occasions that have seared themselves into my soul, causing me to wake up in the middle of the night, filled with rage. One of these occasions involved cryptocurrency, some sock puppets, and 12 gallons of bleach, but that’s a story for another time.

The more relevant occasion for this topic was when I sat facing several grim-looking board members as they chewed me out during my annual review. I came into the meeting so proud of what the team and I had accomplished that year, and left feeling like garbage, a mixture of confusion, shame, and sadness. I was seriously thinking of quitting and finding a new job. Or possibly becoming a hermit. A hermit with reliable Wi-Fi to watch Game of Thrones (It was still a great show at that time).

Annual reviews are done so horribly in our sector, because they’re often done thoughtlessly, taking toxic processes and philosophies from white corporate models. What works over there in a competitive, profits-oriented environment doesn’t mean it’ll work here in a sector where a lot of people are trying to make the world better while being underpaid, wearing “multiple hats,” using Mesozoic-era printers, and burning out. Throw in the shitstorm that is our socio-economic-political situation, and people are barely hanging on by a gossamer thread.

So, let’s be more thoughtful. Maybe we should ditch the annual review completely. Many companies have started moving away from formal annual performance reviews in favor of continuous feedback loops, which have been shown to be way more effective and way less demoralizing.

If you’re gonna do them anyway though, here’s some advice to minimize damage:

Think about the goals, approach, and structural challenges before you do a review: A lot of people do reviews because they think that’s best practice to just get them done, without considering other factors, including many structural issues that may affect how people do their work. Are there funding issues? Are you understaffed? Are people overworked and overstressed? Is there a never-ending apocalypse of pandemic/fascism/g3nocide that you maybe should account for?  

Ongoing feedback is infinitely better than annual reviews: Ongoing feedback, both praise as well as suggestions for improvement, is a lot more useful for encouraging desired behavior. The annual review should be a summary of the feedback that’s been given throughout the year and a check-in on progress made on the ongoing feedback. If you don’t have a system and culture of regular, consistent feedback in place, prioritize creating that instead of focusing on your annual reviews, since without ongoing feedback, annual reviews are often useless, if not actively destructive.

Use workplans to assess people’s performance: Annual reviews should be tied to people’s work plans, where goals are clearly spelled out. If a goal or objective is not written out in people’s work plans or isn’t mutually agreed to somewhere if it’s not in the work plan, you have no basis to review someone’s performance for it. No one should have surprise goals that they’re now being evaluated on.

Use organizational values to assess people’s behaviors: All organizations have a list of values. These should be the guiding principles to assess everyone’s behavior. But often, organizations don’t spell them out, leading to widely different interpretations of things. If you haven’t already, spend some time with your team to discuss your values and what they mean in everyday practice. For instance, if your value is “respect,” what does that look like? It may mean people show up on time, not being on their phone during meetings except for emergencies, answering client emails within two days, or whatever. Spell. It. Out.

Take culture, neurodivergence, and other DEI factors into consideration: Spelling things out and agreeing on a set of behaviors cuts down on unwritten rules, which are especially hard for people from different cultures or who are neurodivergent to navigate. For instance, certain cultures may see eye-contact as a sign of respect, whereas others may find it disrespectful. And some neurodivergent people may find it difficult making eye contact in general, and it has nothing to do with respect. Unwritten rules perpetuate inequity, especially when reinforced through inane performance evaluation processes.

Do NOT use scores and ratings: On my review, I received a bunch of scores, from zero to five. I got a 3.5 on being a team player. What the hell did that even mean? Is that good or bad, and compared to whom? Was it because I refused to share my soy yogurt with Jaime? What defines a good team player? Scores are meaningless and distracting. Maybe if we had a decent sample size of hundreds of people who are trained to provide valid assessments on these scores, but we don’t. It’s a few people, each with a different idea of what each rating means. People feel like crap for no reason because of these pointless, arbitrary, demeaning scores, so stop using them.

Focus on what people are doing well and what they can improve on: Instead of scores and ratings, just focus on two key areas: What areas people are doing well in, and what they can improve on, based again on their work plans and the org’s set of values and associated mutually-agreed-on behaviors. If you’re going to collect evaluation surveys from other people to assess someone, those should be what you ask people to provide feedback on.

Beware of using other people’s feedback to assess someone: People’s reviews of their peers are subjective and often not an accurate indicator of quality. Some of the best supervisors may get horrible reviews from their direct reports, while some of the worst ones may get good reviews just because the team likes them more. In the worst cases, people weaponize evaluation surveys to punish others for a variety of nonvalid reasons, including yogurt-related jealousy or petty revenge. Take all this into consideration if you’re doing 360 or other types of evaluations where you’re asking people to provide ratings and feedback on someone.

Get your team regular training on feedback: Most people suck at giving and receiving feedback. This is to be expected, since our sector tends to attract nice people, and nice people are often conflict-avoidant. And it’s particularly bad in certain geographic areas, including the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest, where we’d rather juggle flaming chainsaws than communicate directly with someone that we didn’t like something they did. To mitigate this, have everyone trained in giving and receiving feedback, and do this several times, not just once. And then keep practicing and give meta-feedback, which is feedback on how the feedback process is going. (Special thanks to my friend, colleague, and feedback expert Ananda Valenzuela for really driving home this point).

Make sure it’s two-way: Feedback and performance evaluations shouldn’t just be from supervisor to direct reports, or from board members to EDs. A healthy working relationship and environment allow for a two-way exchange of feedback. Every evaluation session should include time for the person being evaluated to also provide input on what the evaluator and the rest of the team are doing well and could be doing better.

Finally, be genuinely appreciative and gracious: This work is stressful enough on good days, but these are some of the worst days our sector and the world have seen. It’s dystopian and bleak and never-ending right now, and many people are still doing their best, still showing up, still trying to help people and make things better. Before you start your performance evaluation process, and before you have that annual review meeting with someone, take a moment to appreciate everything they’re doing right, some of which you may not be aware of.

Performance reviews are archaic and we should consider phasing them out in favor of ongoing feedback that’s done thoughtfully and with consideration of equity, power dynamics, and systemic factors. They should not be instruments of fear, shame, or punishment. We work in a sector that already often asks too much of people. The least we can do is have a process that affirms our team members’ humanity, honors their contributions, and helps them grow and thrive.

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