Dive Brief:
- An Adobe survey of 1,500 office workers found that men take performance reviews harder than women, according to a report from Mashable. Men are more likely than women to leave their company following a review, the survey showed. Men (25%) are even more likely to cry than women (18%) after a review.
- Millennials also find coping with performance reviews difficult, with 61% saying they would switch to a company with no such reviews.
- The survey also found that about two-thirds of employees and managers think formal reviews are a waste of time and an outmoded way to measure performance, per Mashable.
Dive Insight:
Employers might pay attention to the way workers and managers respond to performance reviews. Two-thirds of the survey respondents think formal reviews are outmoded and a waste of time.
Mashable says Adobe ended the practice. Whether the tech company did so based on an internal study isn’t clear, but given the results of this and other surveys, shifting gears was a wise thing to do.
Could gender generalizations explain the different reactions to performance reviews between men and women? If some men define themselves by their work, that might explain why an unfavorable performance review hits them so hard.
By contrast, if women are slow to recognize their own achievements, they might find a less-than-stellar review more acceptable than men.