Adobe Systems world headquarters in downtown San Jose, California
If there’s one thing almost everyone in corporate America can agree on, it’s that traditional once-a-year evaluations are a waste of time. Managers and employees dread the discussions, and plenty of evidence shows they don’t produce anything but a pile of extra paperwork.
So, based in part on ideas crowdsourced from employees, Morris, Adobe’s global senior vice president of people and places and her team, scrapped annual evaluations and replaced them with a system called Check In. At the start of each fiscal year, employees and managers set specific goals. Then, at least every eight weeks but usually much more often, people “check in” with their bosses for a real-time discussion of how things are going. At an annual “rewards check-in,” managers give out raises and bonuses according to how well each employee has met or exceeded his or her targets. “Managers are empowered to make those decisions,” says Morris. “There is no ‘matrix.’ HR isn’t involved.”
I – Word Understanding
dread – feared
scrapped – cancelled
II – Have Your Say
1. What are your thoughts on Annual Employee Performance Evaluation?
2. What is the best way to deal with low performing employees?
“ Rank and yank” is a system of analyzing employee performance by which top performing employees are rewarded with promotion and compensation increases while low performing employees are slated for reassignment or termination.
3. Lifetime employment is a distinctive characteristic of Japan’s postwar labor system, although it never applied to many workers in the labor force and is now declining.
