Continuous feedback, even if it’s just regular recognition for good work, is an important tool in the hands-on manager’s toolkit. However, it’s not a replacement for a more formal, 360-based performance review process.
The 360 model is a performance review that includes feedback from, in addition to a person’s manager, his teammates, anyone who reports to him, and coworkers he regularly interacts with, as well as a self-review. For example, an engineer with no direct reports might solicit reviews from two other engineers on her team, the new hire she was mentoring, and the product manager she works with. Performance reviews take a long time because you need to give and receive feedback from many different people. As a manager, you then have to gather all that feedback together and summarize it for the person being reviewed.
Performance reviews reward the time spent by providing a valuable chance to synthesize a bunch of information about a person. Beyond that, 360 reviews give you at least a high-level view into what other people are thinking about your direct reports. The self-reviews give you a sense of what your people believe about themselves, their strengths and weaknesses and accomplishments over the year. Writing the summary review gives you the chance to focus for longer than a few minutes on the individuals and look at the big picture over a longer period of time. All of this should help you see some patterns and trends that you might overlook in the process of day-to-day continuous feedback.
Performance reviews go wrong because people aren’t given time to prioritize working on them, and many people find them hard to write. They go wrong because we tend to remember and overemphasize things that happened most recently, and forget about the things that happened six months or a year ago. They go wrong because we all suffer from various biases of which we may or may not be aware, and we tend to review people through the lens of those biases, criticizing some people for behaviors that we don’t even notice in others. All of these things are true, and you will probably see all of them play out. Despite all that, this process is incredibly valuable, and you as a manager have the opportunity to make it more or less valuable depending on how you approach it.