Fair performance reviews evaluate an employee’s entire year, judge all employees against the same clear criteria, and calibrate scores across managers to account for inconsistencies and biases. But few organizations actually run performance reviews that meet these criteria. Often, these reviews over-prioritize recent performance rather than accurately reviewing the entire year, apply standards inconsistently between managers, and fail to check across teams for inconsistencies.
Here’s how managers and HR leaders can work together to change this, and where performance management software can help.
Key takeaways
A fair performance review is one that treats everyone equally, making every review an accurate representation of an employee’s performance. Employees need to feel like they’re being treated fairly while managers and leaders need to know performance reviews are reliable sources of data. Three main characteristics contribute to a fair performance review.
Fair performance reviews are consistent across teams and departments. They use similar criteria (if not necessarily the exact same ones) to evaluate employees over the same period of time. This prevents an over-reliance on gut impressions or recent performance to represent overall performance.
Performance reviews need clear, documented evidence before a manager can make a judgment. Whether they’re describing a performance issue or an employee’s strengths, they should reference evidence. That can be feedback from an employee’s peers, the results of a project they worked on, or trends in check-ins and 1:1s.
Sometimes, managers worried about fairness are overly lenient. They might ignore well-documented performance issues so employees feel like they’re being treated fairly or avoid looking for the root causes of problems employees mention.
Fair performance reviews assess employees accurately. Finding that middle ground can be challenging, but it’s essential.
Bias can prevent fairness in performance reviews. Everyone has biases, both conscious and unconscious, and managers should be aware of how these biases can affect their performance reviews. Most of the time, however, managers aren’t aware of these biases or their impacts on performance reviews. Here are the biases most likely to come into play.
The recency effect is our tendency to more easily remember information presented more recently. This can affect performance reviews when managers rely on their recollection of an employee’s performance more than documentation and evidence. A performance review might narrowly focus on an employee’s work over the previous month rather than the full year, skewing the result. A top-performer who went through a hard month might be excessively criticized, while an employee who turned around a performance issue right before their review has a glowing review that hides deeper problems.
The halo effect distorts the way people evaluate each other based on certain positive characteristics. Essentially, the presence of one positive characteristic leads people to assume the existence of other positive characteristics without any evidence. It’s why social scientists have researched the impact of characteristics like physical attractiveness and likeability on lifetime earnings and job performance.
In a performance review, a manager might be too lenient with an employee they get along with well, or who’s particularly charismatic in team outings and team-building activities.
Different managers might lean more towards leniency or strictness, which skews the results of their performance reviews. Neither is particularly fair. An lenient manager can cause top-performers to become frustrated as they don’t feel like their reviews actually reflect their performance when compared to under-performing colleagues. A manager who’s too strict unfairly punishes their top-performers with critical performance reviews while under-performers might get completely demoralized and avoid improvement.
In-group bias describes the way people tend to give preferential treatment to people who belong in the same groups they do. That can mean anything from being in the same department to the same social groups and even liking the same sports teams. Points of similarity between a manager and the employee they’re evaluating could skew the results of the performance review.
Some managers tend to avoid the extreme results of a performance review, whether positive or negative, and put employees somewhere around the middle. Top performers get middling ratings compared to their accomplishments, while struggling employees won’t get the support they need because their manager is trying to avoid a difficult conversation.
Knowing how biases can affect the results of a performance review is the first step. From there, managers and HR leaders can put in processes that address these biases and keep performance reviews more fair.
Recency bias thrives when an employee’s performance isn’t properly documented. Continuous performance management means managers check in employees more than just in a yearly performance review. That includes weekly or biweekly check-ins, setting trackable goals (like OKRs), and having regular 1:1s. Each of these check-ins should be clearly documented, tracking progress toward goals, mentioning accomplishments, and highlighting potential issues.
This prevents managers from falling into recency bias, since they’re familiar with an employee’s performance throughout the year and have clear documentation to fill any gaps.
Criteria need to be relatively standard across departments, if not exactly the same. A software developer and an HR professional shouldn’t necessarily have the exact same standards for their performance reviews, since their roles are so different. But the criteria used to transform their performance into a clear result and useful data should be standard. That allows the output of each performance review to contribute to broader data trends consistently and for each employee to be treated fairly.
Criteria should be defined before a performance review cycle and mapped to the competencies leaders want to see in employees.
Performance reviews shouldn’t end with a one-sentence takeaway like “meets expectations.” That gives little for employees or leaders to work with. Feedback should be specific to the issues and accomplishments surfaced in a performance review, and that specificity should be based on evidence rather than gut instincts. Real examples should inform every bit of feedback to make it both more useful and fairer.
Calibration means managers compare ratings to each other before finalizing them. This allows departments to ensure employees aren’t being penalized by harsh managers or pushed up by generous ones. The goal isn’t for the distribution of ratings to match exactly across teams, but to spot discrepancies that can’t be explained beyond bias and similar problems.
Employees should have the opportunity to review their own performance, identify their weaknesses, and share what they believe their strengths are. Being able to mention a project they worked on throughout the year can help counter recency bias. When employees are more involved in rating their performance, this also helps managers document feedback.
Employees also need space to respond to feedback. That doesn’t mean debating the validity of that feedback; it means helping managers find potential blind spots the way they conduct performance reviews.
AI isn’t just useful for automating time-intensive tasks or serving as a sounding board. It can also help remove bias from performance reviews and make them fairer. AI can serve as a support for managers, drafting questions, analyzing an employee’s past performance, and even helping to refine feedback.
For example, 15Five offers agentic AI that includes the following:
No matter what AI tool teams use, it shouldn’t replace the work managers do. Managers should still be in full control of the performance review process, with AI essentially acting as an assistant the whole way.
Recency bias can be one of the largest contributors to performance reviews feeling unfair. Without a process in place to prevent this bias from sneaking into performance reviews, managers might overly prioritize recent performance. Continuous performance management and frequent check-ins can help prevent this.
If managers are left to their own devices when defining performance review criteria, employees will have vastly different experiences depending on the department or team they’re in. To make performance reviews more fair, criteria should be defined ahead of performance review cycles and shared between managers and HR leaders.
Calibration is an important step in the performance review process, since it can highlight discrepancies in how managers rate employees across departments. Too many organizations skip this step, allowing these discrepancies to turn into blind spots that can potentially have far-reaching consequences, from disengaged employees to missed opportunities for advancement.
If employees are expected to quietly accept feedback, performance reviews aren’t likely to feel very fair. They need an opportunity to address any feedback given to them, offering extra context or pushback where relevant.
Many organizations still use annual performance reviews exclusively, with no other performance conversations between employees and their managers. Not only does this introduce the risk of recency bias, but it gives managers little visibility on performance throughout the year and few opportunities to coach employees through challenges.
Having the right processes in place can help managers understand and check their biases, keep performance review criteria more consistent across teams, and give employees a chance to better understand the feedback they receive (as well as providing context where relevant). But processes can only get you part of the way there. You also need the right tools.
15Five is dedicated performance review software that handles everything from continuous check-ins to competency mapping, review calibration, AI-assisted performance reviews, and bias detection. Managers stay in control of the review process, but they get the support they need to deliver fairer reviews at scale.
Want to see how 15Five can help you run fairer performance reviews? Book a demo.