Don't bury the annual performance review | Andris Strazds | TEDxRiga

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED conferences.
Elegantly stepping over the standard reasoning, Andris Strazds demonstrates how one can look at the common in an unconventional way, and that one doesn't have to be a scientist to understand the fine processes and functions of the markets. In this talk, he shares his observations and ideas about the value of annual performance reviews.

Hello.

My topic today is
the annual performance review.

Recently, there have been
quite heated discussions about it,

criticism is ranging
from it being ineffective

and thus a waste of time to even worse:

that it is demotivating
and thus counterproductive.

A UCLA professor recently,
a couple of years ago,

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

meaning that we have to
eliminate it all together.

Well, I have a different view.

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

I'm an economist.

Economics is known as the dismal science.

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

It is that of a funeral.

I recently attended a funeral.

It was the funeral
of a former university professor

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

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

but rather about what happened after it.

So after the funeral we gathered
in the nearby restaurant

and started reflecting on his life.

What happened there, you could say, was

the ultimate performance review
of his life.

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

and they had something to say.

You could say
in corporate terminology,

it was something like
a 360 degree feedback loop.

Surprisingly,
- no, not surprisingly -

actually it was all positive;

negative comments
were consistently avoided

although maybe there were some,

but they were avoided
at that commemorative event.

What was interesting as well,

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

They told quite specific stories.

Somebody remembered
how he had shared his apartment

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

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

of which he was also a big fan.

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

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

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

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

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

His chair at the table was empty.

At that moment I thought:

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

Maybe we can indeed transplant

some of what happened
during that commemorative event

to what we call
the annual performance review

in our companies and organizations.

What would we do?

Well, for one day in a year,

we would make our employees,
our people, our teammates

feel like dead celebrities

like Elvis, like a star,

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

How would we go about it?

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

eliminate the negative feedback, say,

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

And we should also be specific.

We should tell, looking
in retrospective of that year,

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

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

having had just half an hour to prepare;

that presentation helped us
to win an important customer.

Maybe another story how she decided

to get another cash register to eliminate

the hated lunchtime queues at the cantine.

Specific stories like those

instead of some high-level
corporate success story

that would give the person something

to identify with,
be proud of and replicate.

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

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

And fair enough.

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

as an ambulance.

Or maybe for those in the US,

the pizza delivery van
is an even better analogy.

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

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

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

that the person can identify with
and be proud of.

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

but to learn from the ultimate
performance review.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)