One activity that’s pretty much universally hated by both managers and employees is the Annual Performance Review (APR). Why companies persist in conducting these is beyond me as there’s a much more effective way to review and improve your people.

Before addressing a better method, let’s talk about why almost all managers and employees detest the annual process. For managers, APRs involve hours of preparation. Depending upon how the review system is constructed, the managers typically have to sift back through 12 months of activities for each employee, look for trends, analyze how well individual goals were met, take into account external and internal changes that took place during the year, prepare forms for HR and possibly compute amounts for bonuses and raises. That’s a ton of work for even one team member, and most managers are doing it for at least a half dozen or so direct reports.

For employees, APRs are usually an approaching mystery that involves plenty of speculation and, often, fear. Will it be a good review or a negative one? If the year hasn’t been sensational, the employee may come loaded with a list of reasons or excuses. If it has been a great year, she’s likely agitating over the size of her potential bonus and raise.

To use the famous line from the movie Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

I believe the only way to “fix” the APR process is to kick it to the curb and implement something very different: Quarterly Growth Reviews.

Why quarterly? For starters, gathering information for a quarterly review requires minimal research and ensures the feedback is timely and accurate. More importantly, if there’s a problem, it can be addressed clearly and immediately. If a person is failing in part of the job after the first quarter, he has nine quarters to improve and can still end up with a good year. On the opposite end, if a person is doing great, the manager should acknowledge it promptly and not wait for the yearend recognition. Motivation and regular encouragement go hand-in-hand.

The review itself should be objective and specific. The criteria should be spelled out in advance and the metrics established. For production oriented jobs such as sales, quantitative performance standards are normal. But many jobs are difficult or impossible to measure quantitatively. To address that issue, we believe all jobs should have qualitative standards for measuring the subjective elements.

For example, factors such as internal relationships, problem solving ability, product knowledge and administrative functions are often very important in a job. For managers, leadership, training, recruiting and selection, and planning are often critical for success. Failure in any one of these areas can often result in dismissal. The quantitative and/or qualitative standards should be job specific. They should be observable, measurable, correctable, and important.

The last tip is key and is the reason we have managers and leaders in our organizations. The reason we call them Quarterly Growth Reviews is that the ultimate goal is for the manager to help the employee improve. Following the Quarterly Growth Review, there should be a clear, written plan as to what the employee will be doing for the next quarter for personal improvement, and it’s the manager’s duty to help with this.

Quarterly Growth Reviews typically take 20 to 30 minutes to conduct and not much longer for preparation. They enhance communication between managers and their direct reports. If bonuses and raises are given annually, there are no surprises as both parties have been informed along the way.

Try the Quarterly Growth Review. Both managers and employees will like it much better, and performance will improve across the board.

Martin Freedland co-founded Berke Assessment and is president of Berke Consulting. He’s been helping organizations continually improve the way they recruit, hire, train, manage and motivate their people for more than three decades. He has personally worked with hundreds of companies throughout the United States to assist them in increasing profits and productivity through better people management practices. He can be reached at martin@berkegroup.com.