Eighteen years ago, while in labor with my son, I was sitting in front of a laptop trying to finish up a few last-minute urgent tasks before officially starting my maternity leave. I was a recruiting manager at a large public company. What was so critical that I had to sit through waves of contractions typing madly? Finishing performance reviews for my direct reports. Was there something earth-shattering that would be written down in these never-ending questions? No. Was there anything life-changing that had to be documented this one time? No. Was I going to be the decision-maker on any of their rewards or promotions? No. It was just the required process so my employees could potentially be eligible for their small bonus or the 1–2% merit increases that I didn’t decide, just part of the system.

I can tell you that writing performance reviews while in labor (good thing it went 24 hours) didn’t create my distaste for them; it was every performance review I had been given, every forced self-assessment, every forced “strengths and weaknesses” commentary, and most of all, the race to only discuss & look at the compensation versus any honest, constructive growth conversations.

In the best case, the performance review was mainly a formality because my managers regularly discussed how I was doing relative to clear expectations, and there wasn’t anything surprising. In the worst case, random negative comments from some senior employee in an email I never saw months prior exemplifying my lack of diplomacy (probably well-deserved; I’ve never had a massive respect for traditional authority). Even worse, I had worked at a company that set up anonymous peer feedback where people either said next to nothing or something horrible since it was known that everyone was competing for a slight chance of promotions or a high rating.

In 2009, I accepted my first chief people officer role at a startup — I was employee 130. Given that we were building every process in the company from scratch, one of the first things I decided with our CEO (who had zero interest in doing anything “big company”) was that we wouldn’t do the traditional performance reviews or rating systems. Instead, we’d do quarterly check-ins and opportunities to recognize people more regularly versus the once-a-year big bang.

That company grew from 130 employees to over 4000 in three years. Our system wasn’t perfect, but it was the start of building a feedback system reflecting company values. We needed people to be able to move around a lot; we wanted to pay for performance; we needed people to level up their careers & themselves. To do this, you required managers to give feedback more often on how people could improve themselves and our products; you needed to build clarity in job frameworks that people could look to understand if they were ready for promotions — and we needed to do it more often because we were growing so fast in every way. And we didn’t have time for long documents or extensive discussions on ratings that just frustrated people.

So that was the beginning, and at every company I’ve worked at following, I’ve ripped out the performance review systems and looked for new ways of solving what people say are the points of performance reviews. To me, ensuring employees hear from their managers on how they’re doing relative to goals should happen regularly instead of once or twice a year. Managers and employees should have conversations about growth opportunities internally & externally. I want to encourage more direct real-time feedback between peers (in a dream world, non-anonymously, but still working on that), using words like “perspectives, check-ins, or advice” to de-escalate the fear of feedback. The phrase, “Can I give you some feedback?” often creates deep night sweats and heart palpitations.

Despite many leadership and manager training and lectures or great phrases by folks like Brene Brown, “Clear is kind,” Adam Grant, “Withholding feedback is choosing comfort over growth. Staying silent deprives people of the opportunity to learn,” or Kim Scott’s great framing for Radical Candor, people are inherently bad at giving corrective or perceived negative feedback. Managers struggle with giving negative reviews or distinguishing between many employees who are not exceptional or genuinely struggling.

Most performance reviews reflect that same issue. Managers don’t tend to write or share anything negative, so the whole “performance reviews are documentation so you can fire someone” rarely works. One performance review isn’t documentation of any pattern of poor behavior anyway.

Some research also shows how demotivating the performance review process is to top performers. Let alone all of the issues with bias in reviews (and of course, pay).

Instead, managers are more comfortable giving specific, targeted micro-feedback. Situational with context that’s real-time. It’s much easier to comment on things happening in a much smaller time frame and doesn’t feel so burdensome. Things like “That project last week seemed to go off course. You should give a better heads-up to the group before you ship the new features.” Tools like 15Five or Lattice are great support devices — to track regular projects & feedback, flag things, and get a sense in both directions on sentiment.

The last thing that usually comes up is how you handle compensation if you don’t do performance reviews. In a purist world, the performance review should be a separate conversation related to growth and expectations, not solely on rewards. Ratings are generally unhelpful and increasingly complex to defend, especially when there’s a bell curve and a lack of company-wide calibration across managers, teams, and roles.

I’ve done some radical innovation in this area as well by moving to role-based pay, but in the companies where we still had merit increases or bonuses, giving managers a pool to work with found that they were generally pretty good at managing the comms between their employees and themselves in terms of how they did rewards. I’d encourage people to think through whether their “pay for performance” systems are genuinely about performance, do these small increases or bonuses change the behavior of employees, and whether it is performance you want to pay for — or is it impact? What tools are you using to recognize the highest impact, how is it calibrated across the organization, and is that short or long-term rewards? Should it be in salary, bonuses, or equity?

What I have found to be a successful practice is some form of regular talent reviews across leaders where you can calibrate performance, succession planning, and trajectory (I am a big fan of using the word trajectory vs potential as people’s engagement tends to ebb and flow over time). Bringing together leaders to align on what truly defines impact so it’s being discussed in the same way throughout the organization. I’ve even forced conversations on who the top 5 performers are via impact across an entire company to really drive home this alignment (and the process of the discussion/surfacing of those names for all leaders to engage with those people).

I’m encouraged by the number of companies looking at their systems (Adobe lead the way, Deloitte, Netflix, Accenture, others, and now Block joining the club) and applying the same innovation we do for customers and products in this space.