“Nobody wakes up in the middle of the night going, ‘Oh, great, tomorrow is my performance review,” said Jamie Aitken in a moment of light-hearted sarcasm during this episode of #HRTechChat. My latest guest on our video podcast, Jamie is vice president of HR Transformation at Betterworks.

In 2017, Adobe published a report titled "Performance Reviews Get a Failing Grade." The results to the associated survey painted a bleak picture. Startlingly, 22 percent of respondents admitted to having cried after their performance review. From the same survey, 58 percent of respondents said performance reviews are stressful, and 37 percent began searching for employment elsewhere following a performance review. One-fifth of respondents were so impacted by their performance review that they acted on a decision to quit immediately afterward.

“Why are we doing this?" Jamie asked. "It's stressful not just for employees, but for people managers. Traditional performance management doesn’t even move the needle when it comes to performance or productivity.”

It really doesn't. And it really doesn't matter that the results to Adobe's survey are from nearly six years ago. In the time that's passed traditional performance management has surely become even more anachronistic. The old way of doing performance management is, in fact, antithetical to the implicit goal of any company attempting to track and measure their employees' performance: to improve it.

Providing evidence of a viable alternative is Betterworks' own report: "2022 Global HR Research Report: The State of Performance Enablement." Surveying 2,500 employees and managers at a wide range of employers, the vendor found that respondents who were indeed users of Betterworks saw a 25 percent improvement in employee engagement and 44 percent increase in employees' willingness to exert discretionary effort on the job.

Betterworks’ term for this alternative is modern performance enablement. Jamie and I spoke at length on the idea: to dispense with standalone annual employee performance reviews in favor of promoting continuous year-round conversations between managers and their team members. This building of rapport may culminate in a much more meaningful and empathetic annual retrospective on employees' performance informed by the substance of these conversations.

As you can imagine, modern performance enablement is also a huge factor in HR transformation. First, the efficiencies found in modern performance enablement free HR from the often overwhelming administrative tedium of babysitting annual reviews. This helps significantly in delivering HR from its cost-center shackles. Second, modern performance enablement is highly engaging and, therefore, highly inviting. It's a boon to companywide participation rates, which, in turn, produce rich longitudinal data on the performance of the organization's people. With the newfound time and mental space to devote to understanding and interpreting this data, an HR department can become a strategic partner to leadership by being the source of deep insight into the company's people.

Jamie put it best, and I encourage you to watch this episode: “As HR professionals, we now have ways to articulate why what we do matters for the business, and I would say HR should be really excited. Don't wait for the seat at the table to be given to you. Just take it.”