Performance Appraisal: To Rate or Not to Rate?

General employees often dislike being “reduced to a score”, driving companies to move away from a rating-centric performance management to a rating-less system where managers are no longer required to hair-split their best performers and employees do not need to carry an over-simplified label of their contributions to the company.

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While rating-less is still an unproven destination, “less-rating”, i.e. reduced in emphasis and usage of the ratings, could be a step forward and testing ground for shifting management paradigm from evaluating every bit of everyone to regular sessions hosted by people managers, aiming to give constructive feedback on the future but not the past. It demands an uplift of broad-based people management skills which would take time to evolve. It is not advisable to scrap your ratings until you have a clear roadmap to the rating-less.