Annual performance reviews are broken beyond repair. Not "flawed in execution" or "in need of improvement"—fundamentally, structurally broken.
Let me be direct: if you're doing annual reviews, you're wasting everyone's time. The employee dreads it. The manager resents it. And the feedback arrives so late that it's useless for actual improvement.
Most managers know this. They continue the charade anyway because HR mandates it, or because "that's how we've always done it," or because they genuinely don't know what else to do.
The Annual Review Is a Lie
Here's what happens in most organizations: employees work for 11 months with minimal feedback, then sit in a room while their manager awkwardly reconstructs the year from memory and a hastily-reviewed project list.
This is performance management in the same way that a post-mortem is healthcare. It documents what happened. It does nothing to improve outcomes.
Worse, annual reviews create perverse incentives. Employees perform well in the two months before review time and coast otherwise. Managers avoid hard feedback all year and dump it at once. Everyone treats the review as a performance in itself—playing a role rather than having an honest conversation.
Kill Annual Reviews. Do This Instead.
Here's the system that actually works. It's not complicated, but it requires managers to do their job year-round instead of once a year.
1. Weekly Check-ins, Not Annual Ambush
Fifteen minutes every week. Not optional. Not "when there's something to discuss."
In these check-ins, you cover three things:
- What went well this week?
- What's blocking progress?
- What's the one thing to focus on next week?
That's it. No forms, no HR software, no documentation requirements. Just regular conversation.
After 52 of these conversations, an "annual review" becomes unnecessary. Both sides know exactly where they stand because they've been talking about it all year.
2. Immediate Feedback, Not Saved-Up Criticism
If feedback isn't delivered within 48 hours of the event, it's worthless. By the time annual review season arrives, the context is lost and the lesson is pointless.
Made a great presentation? Hear about it today, not in December. Bungled a client call? Address it this week while it's still fixable.
Managers who save feedback for annual reviews aren't being thoughtful—they're being cowards. Hard feedback gets easier to deliver when it's timely and specific. Vague criticism about something that happened seven months ago just feels like an attack.
3. Skip the Ratings. Focus on Growth.
Forced ranking systems and numerical ratings are organizational cowardice masquerading as objectivity.
When you're forced to rate employees 1-5 or slot them into "exceeds expectations / meets expectations / needs improvement," you're not measuring performance. You're playing a game that HR invented to make compensation decisions feel systematic.
What actually matters: Is this person growing? What's the specific next step in that growth?
Drop the ratings. Have honest conversations about trajectory. Tell people exactly what they need to do to level up, and then help them do it.
The Real Reason Annual Reviews Persist
Let's be honest about why organizations cling to broken annual reviews despite knowing they don't work: they're easy for HR to administer and they provide legal cover for firing decisions.
That's it. That's the entire value proposition. Annual reviews exist to create documentation, not to develop people.
If your organization genuinely cared about performance, it would invest in continuous feedback systems, manager training, and weekly conversation time. Instead, most organizations dump the entire burden of "performance management" into a December form-filling exercise that accomplishes nothing.
The Manager's Choice
You have two options:
Option A: Keep doing annual reviews. Fill out the forms. Check the boxes. Have the awkward December conversation where you try to remember what happened in February. Watch your best people leave for companies that actually invest in their growth.
Option B: Manage continuously. Spend 15 minutes a week with each direct report. Deliver feedback in real-time. Skip the ratings theater. Actually develop your people.
Option B is harder. It requires you to be present year-round instead of cramming a year's worth of management into two weeks. It requires uncomfortable real-time conversations instead of HR-approved euphemisms.
But it's the only approach that actually develops people. And developing people is the job.
Annual performance reviews are dead. Stop performing them.