More companies aim to give employees ongoing feedback on their performance rather than leaving it to a high-stakes meeting held just once a year.GETTY IMAGES
Few workplace rituals spark as much anticipation and anxiety as the annual performance review. But that once-dominant fixture of corporate life may be quietly losing its grip. As work becomes faster, more fluid and often hybrid, many employers are questioning whether a once-a-year assessment still makes sense.
For decades, the annual review bundled feedback, ratings, salary discussions and career direction into a single high-stakes conversation. While some high-profile companies have publicly abandoned annual reviews, many are reshaping the process rather than scrapping it entirely – shifting performance management toward more frequent feedback, with the annual review as a time to consolidate feedback rather than deliver a verdict.
“This shift is not just hype, but it’s also not a full-on ‘death of annual reviews’,” says Vanesa Cotlar, vice-president of people and culture at Toronto-based digital life insurance provider PolicyMe, and an HR leadership speaker. “Many organizations are layering in more frequent feedback and calibrations on top of the annual review, not fully abandoning it.”
The annual review is a chance to synthesize feedback already shared, align on goals for the year ahead and handle compensation decisions, adds Ms. Cotlar, while performance coaching happens continuously.
That’s the approach now taken at PolicyMe, which anchors its performance discussions in weekly one-on-one sessions for feedback and clarity of expectations. “Annual reviews are used to synthesize a year’s worth of inputs, not to surprise humans with brand-new information,” she says.
That emphasis on real-time feedback is echoed by Ann Gomez, a productivity and leadership expert and founder of Clear Concept Inc., a consultancy that works with organizations across sectors.
“More and more organizations are emphasizing ongoing, real-time feedback. This is the optimal way to develop others,” Ms. Gomez explains. “It’s not helpful for any of us to receive feedback based on something we did nine months ago.”
While she notes that companies such as Microsoft, GE and Deloitte have publicly moved away from formal annual reviews, most organizations she works with still retain some form of annual process as a way to consolidate feedback. The challenge, she says, is that many leaders remain reluctant to provide timely feedback throughout the year, making the annual review stressful and demotivating when issues surface for the first time.
“Unfortunately, there still are surprises,” she says.
Not everyone is convinced the workplace has fundamentally moved on from traditional reviews. Dr. Linda Duxbury, a professor at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business who studies organizational behaviour and management, says she has not seen widespread evidence that performance reviews themselves are disappearing.
“I haven’t actually heard that they’re changing,” she says. “What I see is that performance evaluation has always been difficult for managers, and hybrid work is making it harder.”
One of the core problems, Dr. Duxbury says, is that the responsibility for reviews sits with managers who are already stretched thin and often lack formal training in how to deliver difficult feedback.
“It’s easy to give a review to somebody who’s doing a great job,” she says. “It’s much more challenging to do a review for somebody whose performance needs work. Managers either don’t have the time, or they’re not trained in the interpersonal skills that are needed.”
She also pointed to well-established psychological biases that distort evaluations, including recency bias – where recent events outweigh a year’s worth of performance – and attribution error, where managers tend to credit success to themselves while blaming failures on employees.
“Performance reviews are vulnerable to all kinds of perceptual distortions unless the manager is trained,” she says. “But organizations often expect managers to do it without giving them the time or support to do it well. Doing it poorly is worse than not doing it.”
Hybrid and remote work further complicate coaching and evaluation, Dr. Duxbury says, because feedback conversations tend to happen more naturally in person. “Certain things should be done face-to-face, and one of them is coaching and mentoring,” she says. “Performance appraisals are also more challenging when not in-person.”
Both Ms. Cotlar and Ms. Gomez acknowledge that more frequent feedback brings its own risks if not implemented carefully.
Annual reviews allow for clear alignment on performance and compensation and enable managers to step back from short-term noise to identify longer-term patterns, which is not as easy with ongoing feedback. More frequent check-ins allow for faster course correction, stronger working relationships and better development, particularly for early-career employees and new leaders, while reducing surprises in formal reviews. But they require stronger managerial skills, consistent documentation and discipline, and can create process fatigue if over-engineered, with too many forms and systems.
“If poorly designed, they can feel like constant evaluation instead of support, which can increase anxiety,” Ms. Cotlar says. “The sweet spot is ongoing, human conversations supported by a light structure, with the annual review as a summary, without the ‘big reveal’ energy that can undermine trust.”
Ms. Gomez agrees that continuous feedback improves engagement and performance when delivered well but cautions that many leaders still undervalue positive reinforcement or avoid difficult conversations altogether.
“When feedback is shared effectively – when the recipient walks away feeling valued and empowered – it has a significant impact on engagement, retention and performance,” she says.
Generational expectations may also be accelerating the shift. Younger employees tend to seek more frequent coaching and developmental feedback, viewing it as linked to growth and job security, both Ms. Gomez and Dr. Duxbury note.
Overall, the experts suggest performance management is not disappearing, but becoming more continuous, more nuanced and more demanding of managerial skill. The real work of development, alignment and engagement is increasingly happening in everyday conversations – making the annual review something closer to a recap than a reckoning.