It’s that time of year again, the dreaded annual review. The well-meaning manager has yet another stack of endless paperwork to add to their already endless paperwork. When it comes to the annual review, the paperwork for a manager at a restoration company, or anywhere else for that matter, has a special kind of discontinuity as they will face a new-and-improved nebulous employee grading system that someone sitting high atop the organization with a gold tipped quill pen composed as their latest masterpiece. The manager will take the multi-page forms home and labor through the labyrinth that is corporate policy dreading only the distribution of the information more than the lengthy composition.

In business, there are rituals that neither management nor employees enjoy and yet they are widely practiced because a) it’s what everyone else is doing, b) we’re required to do it by the unwritten codes of business handed down from our ancestors and/or c) leadership is unwilling to admit that something needs to change. A recent article in Mashable (as well as other sources) notes that 20 percent of employees feel their managers come unprepared to reviews and the result of more than 30 percent of these annually structured meetings lead to decreased performance related to disengagement from the process (McCord 2015). There may be a battle for whom the dread of annual reviews resonates deeper, the manager relaying the information or the employee receiving the life changing feedback.

The process has worked so well for years, why would anyone change it? If things are not changing, the conclusion would be that either organizations do not recognize a need for change or are unwilling to make changes. Managers are overloaded with paperwork, so the company adds more paperwork. Employees feel disengaged from the decision making process and so the organization continues with a murky system that rarely is directly related to advancement or a raise.

With all business practices, shouldn’t leaders be asking – why do we do THIS and is IT serving its purpose?

When the process is presented as a formal meeting that is annual, structured, detailed and graded then the expectation generated from that structure is that it will lead to advancement and/or a raise in salary. There is nothing more confusing than putting on a formal production as an organization that is supposed to be very detailed and yet it formally results in no net change of role or position. If the purpose of the review is not to create a clear path to advancement and/or lay out a process for raise consideration then the structure of the review should be re-tooled.

Many leading companies are recognizing the need to shift how they communicate with their teams and are designing their processes around increasing clarity as well as frequency. Recommendations from progressive leadership voices include conducting more regular check-in points with employees, simplify the process, clarify the messaging, and as noted by Inc. magazine, focus on setting future goals rather than rehashing the past (Winfrey 2015). Cease and desist with annual reviews simply for the sake of annual reviews.

So, where do we start?

Be prepared. This should include clarifying as a leadership what goal(s) these more frequent employee engagement check-up meetings will meet. Dedicate time to preparing for the meeting so that employees understand management values this meeting, values the employee’s time and there is an organizational commitment to evolving as a team.