The book begins with a foreword titled: "It's not supposed to be this way." The authors outline the problems and issues that many people have with performance appraisals. Then they make two key points. Here's the first one.
"Rather than a painful yearly event, performance appraisals can be viewed as a discussion, a culmination of small meetings held throughout the evaluation period."
In other words, performance review grows out of supervision. The rest of the book assumes that those "discussions" are going on. They're necessary to the process, but they're not the subject of the book.
The authors also make the point that: "In one form or other, performance reviews will continue to be a fact of our work life. This book is designed to cut through the anxiety and make the process, or series of discussions, more pleasant and productive."
Even though there are some people calling for the abolition of performance reviews as we know them, that's not likely to happen on a large scale any time soon. If the place that you work has a formal performance appraisal process now, you can count on having to deal with it for years to come.
I assume that if you're considering purchasing this book you will either be looking for ways to make your company's performance review system better or you will be looking for ways to make the process of actually doing performance reviews with your subordinates less daunting. For that reason, I'll split my analysis and recommendations into two parts.
Designing the Performance Review System
If you are responsible for designing or re-designing the performance review system in your organization, this is a book you should read. The research that's referred to matches up well with research I've done and read. The authors do a good job of presenting it and drawing conclusions.
They're also thorough. There's discussion of the current state of performance reviews, supervisor-employee relationships, scorecards, compensation, and much more.
Working Managers
If you are a working manager who has to do appraisals within your organization's system you will find some helpful material here, too. There's good discussion of how appraisals go off track. The authors cover different kinds of rating errors. And, there's material on actually conducting the appraisal.
But this part of the book is not as strong as the part about designing formal appraisal systems. There's not much depth or reach to the material on face-to-face discussion of behavior and performance issues.
That's because those are peripheral issues for the authors in this book. If you want more on face to face discussion, read my book, Performance Talk: the one-on-one part of leadership, which deals specifically with that aspect of supervision.
That's a quibble, though. Stress-Free Performance Appraisals is a solid, well-researched and well-written book that can help you improve the performance review process in your company.
