Raise your hand if you love performance reviews. Wait, you mean you do not love arbitrary, illogical, incomprehensible, biased, capricious, political and subjective assessments of your work?

It is no surprise that performance reviews are the least enjoyable of corporate exercises, painful for both employees and managers. It is foisted upon the unwilling by human resources departments (prodded on by their executive masters) bent on systematizing, justifying and documenting compensation, promotion and layoffs. But if reviews are based on gut-feel, intuitive assessments, then managers are not necessarily making decisions based on the best information. There must be a better way.

Many of the reasons for the failure of performance reviews to accurately assess workers can be summed up as follows: there is no systematic unit of measurement. While a final score is tallied upon completion of the review, the underlying elements that are “measured” are purely qualitative and change at every review cycle. There is no standard applied and little thought process as to how measures relate to business results, employee engagement and workforce alignment of talent. Where else would you do anything that provided such little return compared with the significant amount of effort expended?

If you want to do performance reviews, then you need to rethink what you measure. The most sensible approach is to measure what people do. This is a person’s skills. Then you compare that with what is actually required in a position. These are the skills needed. These skills are based on tasks which are based on goals, thus relating business objectives to the job. This approach tackles several key problems with most reviews: it uses a standard measure of performance called skills, it is tied to business results, and employees understand and trust what they are being measured on because the process is fairer and more transparent.

So let’s make one of our New Year’s resolutions to do more sensible performance reviews.