When I present the 14 points of Deming and the 7 deadly diseases of organization, I usually take some points and diseases as a starting point for discussion and thinking.
One disease I usually pick is the third one:
Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance.
People react in a similar way. They agree they have a problem, annual appraisal are inefficient and demotivating factor… But they “have to” comply to the rules of their organization.
To be clear on that, thoses rules have been set-up usually with the intent to develop people, and improve the performance of the organization. The intent is good, the problem is the evaluation of the performance of the solution, and not to have reconsider the solution sooner.
Since summer 2015 and the announce of the end of annual performance review at Accenture, in the Washington Post, or the Financial Times for example. Accenture join the club of enterprises that get rid of those old practices, like Deloitte before them that work to simplify radically their performance and development system.
Those news represent a good opportunity to start a change in the organization that are still using the old appraisal systems. An opportunity to rebuild the system redefining the intent. What do we want to accomplish? Developing people? Improve organization performance? Something else?