Big companies find new ways to evaluate employees

Big companies like General Electric, Microsoft and Accenture are moving away from annual performance reviews in favor of more frequent and in-depth check-ins with their employees, writes Jeanne Sahadi of CNN Money. This change has come about, in part, because of the millennial workforce. Younger workers, who now make up a majority of the workforce, want more communication and feedback from their bosses and a better understanding of what’s expected of them.

It’s unclear whether these new methods will save employers time. “It’s taking a big chunk of time you might spend once a year, and it’s spreading it out over the course of the year,” Sahadi explained. This could mean more work for managers, she said, because they would be expected to do things differently, which means learning new ways to communicate and train their employees.

These pilot programs are just getting underway, and Sahadi concluded that, because they are so new, “there’s no results yet. We don’t really know how this is going to go.”