I’ve always found the idea of employee quarterly reviews to be very interesting, particularly at smaller companies like ours. We’re aware of what everyone is doing, and we make corrections as necessary as part of our day-to-day work. It seems silly to me to save up the good and bad for a quarterly review rather than correct and praise as needed.
It turns out that Steve Jobs had similar thoughts. In “Becoming Steve Jobs“, they share this bit about reviews:
Where’s your annual reviews and all that? I told him that I’d never had an annual review! Steve didn’t believe in reviews. He disliked all that formality. His feeling was, ‘I give you feedback all the time, so what do you need a review for?’
Based on that, it seems that Jobs didn’t do any kind of quarterly review, whereas we still do. While it’s not a “review” by any means, it’s a good change to catch up, make sure things are going well, set goals for the upcoming quarter, and otherwise just make sure all is steady. Any issues have been resolved at the time of the issue, so there’s no need to make someone nervous about how their performance has been — they should already know.
What are your thoughts on quarterly reviews? What’s the best kind of content to include in them?
