From annual ritual to daily routine: continuous performance management and its consequences for employment security

• Date: 01 March 2018
• Author: Glynne Williams,Vanessa Beck
• Published date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12106

30 New Technology, Work and Employment © 2018 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

New Technology, Work and Employment 33:1

ISSN 1468-005X

From annual ritual to daily routine:

continuous performance management and

its consequences for employment security

Glynne Williams and Vanessa Beck

Management control in the workplace ultimately rests on the

power to dismiss employees who are deemed to be underper-

forming. This article examines a more recent trend away from

annual appraisal and towards continual monitoring and

review. Based on a study of specialist proprietary performance

management (PM) software packages and interviews with the

consultants who market them, the contention is that these

developments are driven by the need to control dismissal. In

the case of the UK, we argue that the adoption of PM systems

needs to be understood as a means of ‘retiring’ older workers who

might otherwise remain in employment. The systems studied here

draw on a range of data, allowing managers considerable discre-

tion in how this evidence is used. Specifically, by dispensing with

explicit ranking methods, these systems suggest a new employer

confidence in the use of subjective evidence.

Keywords: performance management, dismissal, management

consultants, performance appraisal, older workers, employ-

ment security.

Introduction

Performance management is what managers do: a natural process of management

(Armstrong, 2006: 502).

A casual reader of the management press might be forgiven for thinking that perfor-

mance management (PM) had gone out of fashion. After a period around the early 2010s

when companies had been actively encouraged to adopt formal procedures (Williams

and Beck, 2015), a good deal of management writing has more recently been devoted to

explaining why standard methods of PM are unnecessary or even counter- productive

(Crush, 2015; Cappelli and Tavis, 2016). In the most widely known practical example,

Accenture, a large consulting and outsourcing multinational, announced in 2015 that it

was to abandon performance appraisals for its own employees. Accenture, which fol-

lowed Deloitte, Microsoft and a number of other global brand names in renouncing the

annual paper chase, described this as a ‘massive revolution’ (Cunningham, 2015). The

development was newsworthy because a company that had been evangelical about per-

formance and PM ‘has now noticed what has been apparent to every office worker and

every manager in the western world for a couple of decades’ (Kellaway, 2015):

Glynne Williams (gw67@le.ac.uk), Associate Professor in Employment Relations, University of Leicester,

UK.

Vanessa Beck, Senior Lecturer in Work and Organisation University of Bristol, UK.