If the end-of-year performance review had a Facebook page, it wouldn’t be very popular.  Worldwide, maybe 50 “likes.” And yet, despite the disdain it draws from so many, the performance review remains widely prevalent—entrenched, even—in the workplace. Why? Because like standardized tests, you have to evaluate people somehow.

Not everyone’s buying that logic, though. UCLA Management professor Samuel A. Culbert has been a critic of the performance review for some time, and even has a book out with Lawrence Rout called Get Rid of the Performance Review! In it, he labels the performance review “one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities.”

And he’s not the only critic. The Washington Post published an article on their website in January with a title as blunt as Culbert’s quote above. It read, “Study finds that basically every single person hates performance reviews.” The Atlantic followed suit just two days later with a piece titled, “The Case Against Performance Reviews: Workers hate evaluations. Managers hate evaluations. Is there any salvaging this sorry ritual?” With titles like these, 50 “likes” sounds pretty generous.

So, what are some of the alternatives being proposed? Well, Culbert suggests performance previews. These previews would be two-sided, team focused discussions (as in, let’s figure out what we both need to do to accomplish our goals), and they’d be held any time either the boss or the subordinate felt they weren’t working well together. Because they focus on the future instead of on what has already taken place and can’t be changed, Culbert sees performance previews as problem-solving, not problem-creating

Speaking of problem-solving, some companies have actually turned to Facebook for inspiration in overhauling their performance review process. For instance, “Accenture has developed a Facebook-style program called Performance Multiplier, in which, among other things, employees post status updates, photos, and two or three weekly goals that can be viewed by fellow staffers”  (via Bloomberg Businessweek). That just sounds like a daily performance review to us, but hey, at least they’re trying to mix things up.

What does your company do for performance reviews? How successful are they at motivating employees to perform better? What alternatives are you aware of that you’d recommend? Let’s keep this conversation going in the comments section.