Grab the tissues, it’s annual review time

Everyone dreads the annual performance review. But has one ever left you in tears? A new survey from Adobe questioned 1500 office workers and found 22 per cent admitted to having cried after a review. Nearly as many said they’d quit. More men said they’d cried than women. More men said they had quit, too.

No one involved in performance reviews likes the process. Managers consider them time-consuming distractions from their actual work, surveys have found.

They also have trouble distilling how employees performed all year long into one annual meeting and end up giving sub-par workers the same raises and bonuses as stellar ones.

Many companies have done away with the yearly check-in and numerical rankings and switched to giving employees more regular feedback.

But that doesn’t get at the crux of the problem: people are awful at both giving and getting criticism.

“The No. 1 source of anxiety that I hear is fear about it getting emotional, or somebody getting defensive,” says Deborah Riegel, the director of learning at the Boda Group, an executive coaching firm.

“It takes an emotional toll to deal with the messiness of everything from defensiveness, anger, weeping, and passive-aggressive agreement. That’s a lot to deal with.

“A lot of folks have performance-feedback distortion,” says Riegel. “They go: ‘This must mean I’m a terrible person. Who are you to tell me this? You’re not so great, either.”’ Not only do people dislike constructive criticism, but it can also hinder performance, one study has found: anything an employee perceives as negative resonates more than anything else, and anything useful is forgotten.

There are a few things employees, managers, and companies can do to minimise the tears when the dreaded annual ritual rolls around.

For managers, Riegel suggests offering more positive feedback, starting with boosting their praise-tocriticism ratio from 2-to-1 to 5-to-1.

Giving feedback more regularly can also help soften the blow.

As for employees, Riegel suggests they try to “listen without defensiveness” and not take their reviews personally.

“A piece of negative feedback doesn’t have to say something about your character, your career possibilities, or your deservedness to live on this earth with other humans,” she says.

As for those companies eschewing annual reviews, the shift hasn’t fixed all the problems with performance reviews. More feedback in smaller doses can still be time-consuming, and employees don’t always find evaluations fair. And companies that ditched numerical ratings have seen declines in worker performance.

It can, however, reduce the shock of any criticism, says Adobe executive Donna Morris. “People know where they stand at all times,” she says.

— Bloomberg