Pandemic casts eye on performance reviews

As the pandemic wore on this spring, Christine Carrillo, the chief executive of Butler Health, a small online startup that matches people with therapists, decided to postpone the remaining performance reviews scheduled for her employees this year — and probably next year, too.

“The added pressure and unnecessary stress given to reviews right now with everything else — it just feels like a waste of time,” she said. Instead she meets with each of her seven employees biweekly for informal check-ins, Carrillo said.

Long the bane of employees and their managers, the pandemic has forced more companies to reevaluate their performance reviews, accelerating a trend toward more frequent feedback and greater focus on career development.

Some are postponing — at least for now — the timeconsuming and cumbersome ritual of corporate America. Others are attempting to simplify the process as they weigh how to evaluate employees facing unprecedented upheaval and working from home until next summer — or longer.

Carrillo says she’s not sure she will ever bring back the formal review process. “I’m always an advocate for removing things if they don’t work,” she said. “If we don’t have one next year and that goes well, we might not add it back.”

But some experts worry employers aren’t doing enough to change the way they evaluate employees at a time when many, particularly working parents — and disproportionately mothers — are facing mounting burdens.

“The pandemic has unleashed an enormous shock, but that’s not getting reflected in the way so many companies are thinking about performance reviews,” Marianne Cooper, a senior research scholar at the Stanford VM Ware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab, said in an email.

Two recent surveys, while not comprehensive, provide a small snapshot into how some companies have reacted to the crisis. About 30 percent of companies said they adjusted their performance evaluations to account for challenges created by the coronavirus and 5 percent had put reviews on hold or canceled them, according to a survey of 317 employers by McKinsey & Co. and LeanIn.org. Another survey of 1,330 human resources officials, by Aon, a consulting and insurance firm, found 47 percent had made changes to their employees’ performance goals or were considering them.

Several big tech companies did make changes this year to their performance evaluations.

For the first half of 2020, Facebook did not give out individual performance ratings and used a formula to calculate bonuses that were above the standard target — but is returning to its typical process for the second half of the year. Google combined its usual two review periods into one this fall, and will rate employees against revised expectations. Box, the file-sharing service, says it is encouraging more regular feedback between employees and their managers and is also having just one formal review cycle this year, rather than two.

Companies such as Goldman Sachs, one of

Wall Street’s oldest and largest banks, say they are trying to make the review process more clear.

“The dynamics of today’s challenges underscore the need for more transparency,” CEO David Solomon wrote in a memo.

In a year of Zoom meetings and work-from-home life adjustments, companies’ traditional methods of observing employees’ performance has been upended, and their evaluation process is laden with pandemic-era challenges.

But human resources experts also say there’s a potential upside: Remote work naturally forces more scheduled check-ins between bosses and workers, which could have a lasting impact.

“The added pressure and unnecessary stress given to reviews right now with everything else — it just feels like a waste of time.”

Christine Carrillo, chief executive of Butler Health, who is postponing performance reviews in favor of biweekly check-ins