In early 2012, Donna Morris, Adobe’s senior vice president of global people resources, was on a trip to one of the company’s offices in India. An Indian newspaper reporter asked her: “What is new or innovative in human resources these days?”
“Well,” she said, “we plan to abolish the performance review format.”
The line ran on the paper’s front page the next day. According to an account on the website of the investor John Doerr, she was jet-lagged, and she hadn’t yet discussed the idea with her HR staff or with Adobe’s CEO.
She had been frustrated for a while. Adobe was moving from boxed software, which by her description took 12 to 18 months to release, to cloud-based software and real-time services. Many of its core people processes, she said, had stayed the same. Adobe’s own staff blog later put her questions this way: if reviews were supposed to give people useful feedback, why did voluntary attrition always spike in the months after review time? And why did they pull managers away from their most meaningful work for weeks at a time? In Doerr’s telling, managers spent eight hours per employee on the process, about 80,000 hours in all, the equivalent of nearly 40 full-time hires.
“I blurted out something that I really wanted to be changed,” Morris said later. “It was an intentional catalyst.”
She then posted a question on Adobe’s intranet: “If we did away with our ‘annual review,’ what would you like to see in its place?” Doerr’s account calls the thread that followed one of the most widely engaged discussions in company history.
What came out of it was called Check-in. Adobe dropped the annual review, the ratings, the rankings and the long appraisal forms. In their place came ongoing conversations between managers and their people about three things: expectations, feedback, and growth. Teams could choose their own rhythm; an engineering group working in eight-week sprints, the company said, might check in every eight weeks. Managers received budgets and decided raises themselves, with no forced distribution.
In July 2013, nearing the first anniversary of the rollout, Morris wrote that it had felt like a risk at the time. Adobe, she said, was saving 80,000 hours of managers’ time, and attrition was down year over year. Eight months later she reported that voluntary attrition was still trending downward. In 2016 two researchers wrote in the Harvard Business Review that Adobe reported fewer dismissals, because struggling employees were watched and coached more closely. All of these figures come from Adobe itself.
The approach did not stay fixed. Years later, by which time Adobe says its headcount had nearly tripled, it added a digital version of Check-in: a central web tool where employees and managers write down goals, feedback and career plans, with conversations held quarterly. There is still no formal rating or ranking.