The brilliant reason why one of the world's biggest companies is getting rid of performance reviews

Accenture is getting rid of annual performance reviews - because the company believe they only encourage narcissism and self-promotion.

As of September, the firm will disband rankings and annual assessments, moving instead to a more fluid system of timely feedback on an ongoing basis, after completion of tasks and projects.

Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme told The Washington Post:

Imagine, for a company of 330,000 people, changing the performance management process—it’s huge.

We’re going to get rid of probably 90 per cent of what we did in the past.

Accenture will join a small but growing list of companies abandoning the system, citing time-consuming paperwork and inter-office frustrations as the reasons. Nanterme said:

All this terminology of rankings—forcing rankings along some distribution curve or whatever—we’re done with that.

We’re going to evaluate you in your role, not vis à vis someone else who might work in Washington, who might work in Bangalore. It’s irrelevant. It should be about you.”

Brian Kropp, the HR practice leader for the Corporate Executive Board, said:

Employees that do best in performance management systems tend to be the employees that are the most narcissistic and self-promoting.

Those aren’t necessarily the employees you need to be the best organisation going forward.

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