It’s pretty damn easy to bash performance reviews.

As The New Yorker noted in an article this past summer,

Few institutional practices are as old, or have been hated as long, as the performance review.

Last year, The Washington Post published the results of a survey research by psychologists at Kansas State University, Eastern Kentucky University and Texas A&M University into employee evaluations, and the somewhat tongue-in-cheek headline on The Post story pretty much tells it all:

Study Finds That Basically Every Single Person Hates Performance Reviews.

I have long made the case, based on years of writing and giving performance reviews, that the employee evaluation process in most organization’s is flawed and broken, but I’m not going to go down that road here, especially because there are other voices — like frequent TLNT contributor and Success Factors/SAP Vice President Steve Hunt — who make a great case for simply improving the review process.

Millennials think performance reviews suck

So, please consider this performance review data from a new survey by TriNet — they provide HR services for small and midsize businesses, including TLNT’s parent company, ERE Media — as simply a snapshot in time about a long-standing talent management process.

The survey, according to a Tri-Net press release, “Reveals the negative impacts of traditional performance reviews on working Millennials. While performance reviews are widely accepted, the survey confirms that companies need to radically change their process for sharing feedback in order to retain top talent and stay competitive in today’s job market, especially with the younger workforce.”

Here are some of the key findings, and they aren’t pretty:

continue reading…TLNT

by John Hollon

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