BOSTON - eTradeWire -- Lynn Bentley, President of Knobull reported, "Even the highest-performing employees often feel a sense of dread and anxiety heading into an annual or biannual performance review. It can be especially nerve-wracking to think about all the things that are impacted by these one or two review meetings, from compensation to career mobility."

The bottom line is that the tradition of doing performance reviews only once or twice a year is broken, and it needs to change. In addition, the review foundation should be based on a fully functioning performance management program.

If the point of performance reviews is to provide clarity and improve employees' performance, they should be built around a system that gives employees, including managers, the feedback they need to be successful in the moment. The starting point for updating any performance-review structure is to ask employees for their feedback on what's working and what needs improvement.

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Review conversations work best when they're set up in a way that feels less daunting. More frequent, informal conversations between managers and direct reports lead to more frequent opportunities to address what's on the employee's mind —both the good and the bad—and help them course correct based on real-time feedback.

Peer feedback can be immensely beneficial, as it allows employees to gain an understanding of how their own work is perceived by their colleagues. This helps them figure out how to best utilize their own skills and how they can collaborate with their peers to be productive as a team.

Bentley concluded, "At the end of the day, employees should know how they're doing on the progress toward completion of agreed upon objectives. Their manager should know where their direct reports want to go with their careers and how to best support them. Performance reviews should deliver on those goals in an empathetic way."