After the Performance Review, People Leave (1) — Where Does the Distrust Come From
A while back I was watching YouTube and came across a video about performance reviews and turnover rates. It made a fair amount of sense, and when I mapped it onto the companies I've worked at, there was a lot worth thinking about.
The starting point for seeing both sides at once
I was lucky enough to start my working life as a manager. It sounds good to call it "manager," but at first the team was small, so most of my time went to hands-on work anyway. Endless meetings and reports, on top of all the actual work I had to get done myself. Naturally I started wondering how I could possibly handle all of it well, and at the same time, whether I was actually being paid appropriately for what I was doing. Back then, forget HR — just getting through each workday was hard. Looking back, it wasn't a company with much of a system or good policies in place to begin with.
If anything, it was precisely because the company had nothing set up that I ended up thinking from several angles at once at that point, and that turned out to help me later in my career. The habit came in quite useful for working a bit more comfortably while still producing good results. Of course, that first job had plenty of problems, and I ended up leaving early.
The structure that turns HR into everyone's punching bag
At one of the more recent companies I worked at, the grumbling about the HR team never let up. Almost every employee had complaints about HR, and for various reasons, people would raise issues, get into conflicts, and it would repeatedly end in someone quitting. The HR team, for its part, was constantly changing direction and patching things up on the fly under orders from the CEO and executives, without ever getting a real chance to do proper work. The video I watched pinpointed part of this problem pretty clearly.
What the numbers say
According to the video, most employees these days don't trust the HR system. A majority are dissatisfied with their review results, and feel that objective standards are either absent or seriously lacking.
Job changes cluster around April to June. That's not strange when you consider the common practice of running reviews at year-end and handling salary negotiations (or notifications) in January and February. Seven out of ten respondents say they've considered changing jobs right after receiving their review results, which makes it obvious that performance reviews have a huge impact on working life.
Distrust, the video says, generally comes from three sources.
- Evaluations based on a supervisor's subjective judgment
- HR management and review results running on separate tracks
- The absence of objective standards
The company where all three applied
At one of my previous workplaces, someone who had been an executive at a fairly well-regarded startup came on board as an executive. Naturally, they weren't an HR specialist. Supposedly to set up rules for performance reviews and salary adjustments, they built an Excel file with scoring and formulas visible only to management, and used it to rank employees. Among the evaluation criteria was something as shocking as overtime hours — and of course, the more of it you logged, the better your score. With no distinction by department or role, every employee was thrown onto a single table and ranked.
Each team lead entered evaluations for their team members every month, but those evaluations were barely reflected in anything real. When it came time to decide raise percentages, HR itself was cut out of the process, and for most employees the adjustments were decided by a handful of executives, with no relation to the rankings at all. All three sources of distrust in performance reviews applied to this company, every single one.
The team leads' influence naturally eroded, and distrust and dissatisfaction toward HR kept growing. I once read the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual," produced during World War II by the OSS, the CIA's predecessor. It's a collection of tactics for wrecking an enemy organization from the inside — push everything to committees, nitpick minor wording, reopen decisions that have already been settled. Watching that company, I thought it looked exactly like that. Quite a while later, that executive left, but the company kept running in a mess all the same.
The direction is right — but will people actually change?
The video cites several cases and says performance reviews these days are shifting toward multi-rater and absolute evaluation. Continuous feedback and documentation, explainable compensation, and role- and skill-based evaluation are the direction things are heading. Looking at the good and bad cases I've seen firsthand, that does seem to be the general trend.
Of course, whether there are actually organizations where that kind of change has been applied well and is genuinely working is a separate question, I think. It's said that leaders are shifting from being evaluators to people who support growth and coaching — but how easily do people really change like that? Naturally, organizations won't change easily either. On the surface, things will move toward a direction that looks plausible and appealing, but in the end, it's management and leaders who need to change.
So how should leaders change? Can people even change? This is running long, so I'm going to split it into two parts. That's it for today.