WEBVTT

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Hello.

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My topic today is 
the annual performance review.

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Recently, there have been 
quite heated discussions about it,

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criticism is ranging 
from it being ineffective

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and thus a waste of time to even worse:

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that it is demotivating 
and thus counterproductive.

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A UCLA professor recently,
a couple of years ago,

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wrote a book titled 
"Get rid of the performance review,"

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meaning that we have to 
eliminate it all together.

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Well, I have a different view.

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I think we should keep it, but we should 
at the same time change it radically.

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I'm an economist.

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Economics is known as the dismal science.

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Thus, you will probably not be surprised
by my choice of analogy here.

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It is that of a funeral.

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I recently attended a funeral.

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It was the funeral 
of a former university professor

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who passed away having lived 
a long life, aged about 80.

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It's not that much 
that I want to talk about the funeral,

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but rather about what happened after it.

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So after the funeral we gathered
in the nearby restaurant

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and started reflecting on his life.

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What happened there, you could say, was

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the ultimate performance review
of his life.

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Quite many people stood up, 
one by one, sometimes a couple,

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and they had something to say.

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You could say 
in corporate terminology,

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it was something like 
a 360 degree feedback loop.

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Surprisingly,
- no, not surprisingly -

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actually it was all positive;

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negative comments 
were consistently avoided

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although maybe there were some,

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but they were avoided
at that commemorative event.

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What was interesting as well,

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most people, maybe not all of them,
but most people were very specific.

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They told quite specific stories.

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Somebody remembered 
how he had shared his apartment

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while he was a young student 
and was looking for a place in the dorms.

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Another one talked about how 
he made her passionate about ice hockey,

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of which he was also a big fan.

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Of course, there were also stories 
about them having fun together,

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but they were all, most of them, 
were specific stories.

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There was a pity though, 
so to say, in the air, a feeling

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that [it is] a pity actually 
that we save all those good stories

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for the moment when the person 
is not able to hear them anymore.

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His chair at the table was empty.

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At that moment I thought:

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"How can we use it, 
how can we learn from it?"

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Maybe we can indeed transplant

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some of what happened 
during that commemorative event

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to what we call 
the annual performance review

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in our companies and organizations.

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What would we do?

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Well, for one day in a year,

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we would make our employees,
our people, our teammates

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feel like dead celebrities

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like Elvis, like a star,

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make them feel like they have a fan base
in our company or in our organization.

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How would we go about it?

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Well, one thing, we should stick 
just to the positive,

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eliminate the negative feedback, say,

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negative feedback on that particular day
of the annual performance review is tabu.

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And we should also be specific.

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We should tell, looking 
in retrospective of that year,

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how that person contributed 
to our company and tell specific stories,

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say, how that person, for example,
made a great presentation,

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having had just half an hour to prepare;

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that presentation helped us 
to win an important customer.

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Maybe another story how she decided

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to get another cash register to eliminate

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the hated lunchtime queues at the cantine.

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Specific stories like those

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instead of some high-level 
corporate success story

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that would give the person something

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to identify with, 
be proud of and replicate.

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At this point, 
I feel a question in the air,

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a question about: "What do we do then
with the negative feedback?"

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And fair enough.

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Well, I think that negative feedback
should arrive throughout the year

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as an ambulance.

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Or maybe for those in the US,

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the pizza delivery van 
is an even better analogy.

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So negative comments should be instant,
as well as positive comments, of course,

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but for the annual feedback,
for the annual performance review,

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we should stick just to the positive,
in form of specific stories

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that the person can identify with
and be proud of.

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Thus, my suggestion is not to bury
the annual performance review,

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but to learn from the ultimate 
performance review.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)