Why Annual Performance Reviews Impair Performance
Technological development has fundamentally changed how humans live and work. The lives we now lead would not be recognizable to even our grandparents. Whilst this has led to an increase in the quality and duration of our lives, our brains have not evolved to keep up with these developments at the same pace.
How our brains respond to fear
Whilst we have developed our capacity for complex thought to drive this innovation, we are still driven by a very basic “fight or flight” mechanisms for dealing with fear and our survival as a species. Some might say that this fear about our survival is currently redundant.
Our brains have not yet evolved to tell the difference between actual physical danger and perceived psychological or social danger we experience. We respond to these “threats” today the same way we did to the presence of a wild animal centuries ago. They both activate our fight or flight mechanisms.
The changing world of work
The world of work is one of the places where the mismatch of these evolutionary processes play out.
How we work has evolved at a rapid rate, but how we respond to these changes has not. Research has shown us that when humans are exposed to frequent change or high levels of ambiguity, our thinking brain or our pre-frontal cortex shuts down. In these situations, our more archaic “fight or flight” orientated mid-brains take over. When we are anxious, our brain releases stress hormones and shuffles our priorities. We go into a vigilant scanning mode.
Work as a part of life is relatively new in terms of human evolution, as for most of our history our waking hours has been taken up with foraging for food. When we look at the history of work most of it has been taken up by production based work that has required physical labor. How people were handled in this production phase of work required much less complex thought. This allowed for, and often required, a command and control form of management to ensure productivity. The midbrain was primarily involved in the tasks required for repetitive production based work.
With the advent of knowledge based work everything started to change. Most of our work days started to involve complex thought. The part of our brains required for work shifted from our midbrains to our frontal cortex. This required keeping the frontal cortex functioning optimally, necessitating keeping fear at a minimum.
We don’t like judgement
We know from research that one of the things causes a fear response is feeling judgment in our relationships. Our emotional response to being judged is the feeling of shame. Feeling shame results in our becoming increasingly defensive. In this defensive position our ability to use complex thought all but disappears.
With this in mind we can begin to see how management methods in industrial and post industrial work environments need to be evolved.
The review of people’s performance input by managers is way less effective on knowledge based workers than on factory knowledge workers.
The annual review of staff made famous by Jack Welch has become standard in most organizations. These reviews have been shown by research to create increased fear in employees.
Two reasons they do so is because the reviews have been used to inform financial compensation, as well as to decide whether to promote or dismiss employees. If we follow the neurobiological model, we can see how annual reviews can inhibit frontal cortex functioning and therefore actually reduce performance in modern organizations.
Retaining talent
In a world where finding and retaining talent has become an imperative, ensuring that these people remain engaged and are performing optimally is a non-negotiable. Innovative organizations are beginning to recognize this and are finding ways to drive performance without reducing engagement.
Improving performance through ongoing assessment
At Snapp360 we are helping clients to engage teams by using continuous assessment tools through a socially based methods of 360 team assessments. This puts the people firmly in control of their assessment process. It allows for feedback in real time, and that is developmentally orientated. . We believe that this method helps to reduce fear responses, increases employee engagement, and drives team performance.
The feedback metrics gathered then form the basis of coaching conversations with team leaders. We believe that metrics on their own don’t change behaviour, but rather that developmentally minded leaders functioning as coaches do so.
At Snapp360 we are developing technology that allows for performance tracking that empowers both employees and leaders as well as driving engagement in modern organizations.
Trevor Hough is an Organizational Development Consultant and CEO and Founder of Snapp360. For more information on how the Snapp360 app can assist you to drive performance in your business contact Trevor at [email protected]
