Most workers hate performance reviews. They’re stressful, and often require giving or receiving difficult feedback. But one company is doubling down on the process and making performance reviews for employees at the company available for everyone else to see.
Six years ago, Garner, a 300 person health tech company that offers additional benefits to workers, decided to overhaul their entire review process with the goal of increasing accountability amongst coworkers and creating a more communicative work culture, chief people officer Valentina Gissin tells Fortune.
“Call it radical candor with high standards,” she says. “We want to create the conditions for people to do the best work of their lives and a big part of that is this notion of courageous communication.”
Garner isn’t the only company taking an experimental approach to performance evaluations, which have a dismal reputation within the HR community—only 2% of CHROs from Fortune 500 companies believe their performance management system actually inspires employees to improve their work, according to a Gallup study published last year. In 2016 Accenture scrapped annual reviews and instead directed managers to provide feedback directly after assignments were completed, The Washington Post reported. And in 2022 Yahoo, traded bi-annual evaluations for more habitual check-ins.
So how exactly does Garner’s process work? At the beginning of each review period, which happens twice a year, employees engage in a 360 review process with their colleagues. A worker must be at the company for at least a few months to engage in the process. The staffer selects which people they would like to review them, and their manager must sign off on the list to avoid bias. In addition to that, staffers can write reviews for anyone they want, including coworkers, managers and upper level management.
Gissin and her team read over all reviews to make sure they are not inappropriate, but she says they have never censored anyone’s evaluation. All reviews are then available to everyone at the company.
Employees say the process is starkly different from other organizations they’ve worked at, and takes some getting used to. But one worker who Fortune spoke with says it’s a positive thing.
“The first time going in, I was a little nervous, didn’t totally know what to expect,” says Madison Frye, a senior product manager at Garner, who’s been with the company for three years. “I haven’t been surprised by any feedback that came up because it tends to align with the general feedback that I’ve gotten throughout the year.”
She says public performance reviews have encouraged her to ask her peers for feedback more often, including outside of the review process. Other employees enjoy reading the reviews of company leaders in particular, as they feel it offers a window into their thinking and expectations.
“When I see feedback being given to and by senior leadership at the company, I pay attention,” says Megan Cunningham, a senior account manager at Garner who’s been with the company for more than four years. “I want to see how they’re communicating and what they’re talking about and it adds another layer of transparency in another way that’s not just another all hands meeting.”
Not everyone agrees with the idea of 360 performance reviews, let alone making them public within a company. Detractors argue that they can make employees hesitant to give feedback to each other because of how it could impact a coworker’s compensation or future, says Carolyn Troyan is the president and CEO of Leadership360, an HR consulting and leadership coaching firm.
She also notes that most managers and employees receive very little training around how to provide constructive feedback, and publishing performance reviews for everyone to see could cause tension between colleagues.
“I think everyone should always ask for more feedback, but publishing it? I’m not sure that builds a ton of trust, especially if you’re given no warning about what the feedback could be,” says Troyan. Even in a company with a strong culture, she says, “it would still be scary and could result in a huge mess if not done right.”
Gissin admits that not all employees at [Garner] are thrilled about making their reviews public. But she maintains that the benefits outweigh the costs.
“I’m sure there are cases in which there have been things that people have seen published that they would prefer not to have seen published,” she says. “But the net effect is that because we have this culture year round, we’re able to train people to understand that constructive feedback isn’t personal, it’s just a core part of how we get better both as individuals and as a team.”
