By Lillian Cunningham and Jena McGregor | The Washington Post
Lately a small but growing number of major U.S. companies, including Accenture, Adobe and Gap, have been saying goodbye to an annual rite of corporate life that both employees and managers love to hate: the traditional performance review.
Now General Electric, long seen as Corporate America’s bellwether for management practices, is joining their ranks by piloting a big shift in the way it handles reviews at the industrial giant.
GE’s overhaul, which the company recently began sharing publicly, is likely to be viewed as a tipping point in the rush to remake a process that both workers and their bosses have increasingly felt needs repair. It is experimenting with replacing a once-a-year formal review with more frequent conversations, introducing an app to help employees’ managers and teammates share feedback and testing the idea of using no performance ratings at all.