Adobe Ditches Formal Performance Reviews Adobe Systems, the maker of Acrobat, Photoshop, and Flash software, revealed the following bad news about formal performance reviews. The survey found that more than half of office workers feel that formal performance reviews have no impact on how they do their jobs and are a needless HR requirements. Eighty percent of office workers would prefer feedback in the moment rather than a progress review after a certain number of months. Performance reviews are extremely stressful for both managers and employees. Rankings and results brings in even more stress. A surprisingly large number of workers, both male and female, reported actually crying after a performance review and either looked for another job or quit their jobs shortly afterwards. For reasons such as these, Adobe stopped doing formal reviews in year 2012. The effort to ditch them began somewhat haphazardly when Donna Morris, a senior vice-president of human resources for Adobe, believed the firm's 360 degree employee reviews and ranking process was too complex, bureaucratic, and ate up massive amounts of time for which the company saw little or no return. She also believed that they created barriers to teamwork and innovation because being tanked for compensation seemed to pit employees against one another. Morris wrote her case for ending performance reviews and posted it on the company's intranet. She encouraged employees and managers to examine Adobe's current review practice to figure out how to improve it, which they subsequently did. What they discovered was troubling. Adobe's managers were spending in excess of 80,000 hours annually on the reviews. Worse yet, feeling demoralising by their reviews and rakings, a high number of Adobe employees quit after having them. That was making it hard for Adobe to retain talent, especially because it is located in Silicon Valley, where the demand for tech employees is high. Instead of formal performance reviews. today Adobe employees have periodic "check-ins" with their managers who offer them feedback, help with on-the-job problems, and ideas for their growth and development. No written review is required. Employees said the check-ins make performance conversations easier, and less stressful, and that they can get immediate and better feedback. Voluntary turnover has dropped dramatically. "We love to share this new performance management system with other companies who are considering a move away from structured performance reviews," says Morris. "Now we want to make it easier to share our experience with people who are exploring a model like this." Source: Adapted from Snell, S & Morris, S 2018, Managing human resources, 18 th edn, Cengage, Pp311-312.