29th September 2026
Annual Performance Reviews Aren’t the Problem. Annual-Only Performance Management Is
By David Hassell, Co-founder and Vice Chairman of 15Five
At the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit this spring where I spoke on the panel, “Is the performance review broken?” the moderator began our session by asking for a show of hands: Who believes performance reviews are transparent, fair, and inspire better performance?
Almost no hands went up.
That reaction reiterated what most leaders already know. Traditional performance reviews take enormous amounts of time without reliably producing trust, clarity, or better performance.
But I do not believe the answer is to eliminate reviews entirely. We tried that idea as a business community a decade ago. The movement toward continuous performance management correctly recognized that people need timely feedback, yet some organizations threw out the valuable moment of stepping back to assess performance and growth.
The real problem is putting the weight of one annual review to carry a year’s worth of memory, evidence, feedback, and decision-making.
Built for a slower world
Annual reviews made more sense when work happened more slowly and managers could reasonably reconstruct a year from memory. That is not how work happens now.
Today, the pace of work continues to speed up. In its wake is a continuous trail of meetings, messages, customer touch points, project management updates, and data from the dozens of other platforms on which work is performed. At the same time, priorities can shift quickly. Waiting until year-end to discuss an issue from months earlier does little to help someone change the behavior while it matters.
The delay also introduces predictable distortions. Recent work overshadows earlier contributions. Highly visible activity receives more weight than quiet, cross-functional impact. When evidence is incomplete, managers rely on what they remember most clearly and on subjective impressions. Employees spend hours assembling a paper trail of work they have already moved past.
The resulting conversation becomes an exercise in historical reconstruction when it should be about development.
Continuous cannot mean continuously burdensome
The alternative is not to replace one large administrative event with dozens of smaller ones. When continuous performance management means more forms, check-ins, and reminders, managers experience it as continuous administration.
A better model combines frequent feedback and coaching close to the moment when work happens with a lightweight, periodic opportunity to reflect, assess, and make necessary talent decisions.
For many organizations, two lighter reviews a year – supported by regular one-on-ones and timely feedback – will be more useful than one exhausting annual process. The precise cadence can vary. The principle is what matters: formal reflection should summarize and advance an ongoing conversation, not begin it.
This approach eliminates surprises at review time.
Use AI to prepare context, not replace judgment
AI creates an opportunity to make this operating model practical. It can organize the context already produced through work: progress against goals, project contributions, feedback themes, recurring blockers, and commitments from prior conversations. It can alert a manager to a possible coaching moment or a blind spot while there is still time to act.
That does not mean AI should decide whether someone performed well, deserves a promotion, or has leadership potential. Those decisions require human judgment, empathy, accountability, and an understanding of circumstances.
The design principle should be simple: AI prepares the context; humans exercise the judgment.
Instead of spending hours administering a backward-looking process, managers can spend more of their attention where it creates value: clarifying expectations, recognizing contributions, removing blockers, and coaching people forward.
From recording performance to developing it
A modern performance system should do four things well:
- Make expectations visible
- Surface useful context while it remains actionable
- Help managers focus their limited attention
- Improve the information that informs human judgment
Formal reviews still have a place. Organizations need them to make decisions about compensation, promotion, succession, accountability, and development. But the review should document the past briefly and organize the conversation around the future.
The question is no longer, “How do we improve the annual review?” It is, “How do we build a system that helps people perform and develop all year?”
About the author
David Hassell is the co-founder and Vice Chairman of 15Five, an AI-powered performance management platform. For more than 15 years, he has worked with organizations to help managers become more effective and unlock the potential of their people. Connect with David on LinkedIn.
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