By Tim Mullen, co-founder of Heelix

Performance reviews – does the word make you shudder? Me too. In my opinion, the age-old tradition of the annual get together with your superiors is outdated. There’s been a lot of chatter around performance reviews, with more and more organisations choosing to let the age-old tradition go. So who are these organisations? Currently, Accenture, Deloitte, GE and Adobe are some of the high profile names who announced they were going to scrap performance reviews in favour of a more agile, continuous feedback approach to help improve the performance of their teams. Rather than waiting a year to hear about how they’re doing, employees now have the opportunity to learn as they go, picking up valuable intel that can help them develop, perform at their peak and be happier at work overall.

In many traditional organisation structures, there are times when processes go unchanged despite the obvious frustrations that employees (and managers) have with the way performance reviews are rolled out. While they have served a purpose in the past (particularly in top-down, industrial style organisations), performance reviews are out of date. Simply put, they haven’t adapted to the demands of the modern business environment and, as a result, organisations treat them as a pure ‘tick-the-box’ exercise.

As Penny De Valk, Managing Director Penna Talent Management, said in an interview with the BBC, “the annual appraisal has become a compliance element. We’ve got caught up in the paraphernalia that sits around performance management and forgotten the point”. And, on this note, when it comes to individual performance, why do we wait to give feedback at a specific time rather than when it happens? We don’t seem to do the same if we’re working on a project.

Imagine a group of ten people all working on a six-month project together. Along the way, they identify issues, areas where things could be improved or where a change of tact is needed in response to a market threat. Instead of raising the issues as they go, they instead decide to wait until the project has been delivered to say something. They then wonder why they’ve missed their targets and why they didn’t change the approach along the way.

The truth is, the underlying purpose of performance reviews has been forgotten by the incumbent system – the fact that we’re human beings, that we feel, experience emotion and, occasionally, need help (let's face it, we really don’t know it all). We need guidance, assurance and ways in which we can improve ourselves. In the absence of feedback, we’ll keep spinning the same metaphorical cog-wheel, without ever knowing how we can be better.

Speaking with Alec Bashinsky, he likened performance reviews to drive-by shootings – you just never know when you’re going to get hit.

Here’s an example – a friend of mine came to me recently saying he was unclear on how he was performing. He was heading up a complex project that featured ambitious goals and a tangled web of stakeholders and politics. Taking it in his stride, he was giving it all he had, and by all accounts was doing a great job. He even had people from other teams commenting on some of the great work he had done.

What he lacked, however, was any sort of feedback from his manager. Sure, there would be the odd pat on the back for how he managed a particular situation or meeting, but as time went on there was no clear sense of how his work was viewed overall. Until the performance review, where he received glowing praise and a top rating.

No doubt this case isn’t the only one of its kind. In an article published by the Washington Post, Accenture chief executive Pierre Nanterme said, “people want to know on an ongoing basis, am I doing right? Am I moving in the right direction? Do you think I’m progressing? Nobody’s going to wait for an annual cycle to get that feedback.”

The question, therefore, is how much angst could we avoid by implementing a more real-time form of feedback on our performance? How many more people could we keep motivated? Better still, how many people could we help to improve skills and expertise so they can progress on to bigger and better things?

So I commend the changes being made by the growing number of companies who are moving to a different form of performance reviews, embracing the new and trying something different. Will they have challenges along the way? Of course, implementing any new system or process does.

There will always be the need to record and measure your performance against a number of targets. The introduction of more real-time feedback will undoubtedly help you get there faster or work out if you need to change tact along the way.

We learn through experience, it’s part of who we are as humans; from the day we are born, it’s how we grow and acquire new skills. But we do that by a process of continuous learning, not just at a few points in time. So we have a responsibility to each other to make that happen.

As De Valk sums up, “if our people are a true source of competitive advantage then managers must be held accountable for getting their people there. It’s a different skill set but it’s how you would expect a manager these days to add value to their teams.”