How to make sure your six-monthly reviews add real value to your business

Stop doing them. There, fixed it for you.

Seriously. If you’re still clinging to six-monthly or annual performance reviews, hoping they’ll magically boost performance, I’ve got news: they won’t. I’ve been around the block, and I’ve yet to see one shred of evidence that these ritual appraisals actually improve performance. Not a jot. Why do we keep this broken system on life support? It’s corporate inertia, pure and simple – companies following tradition like it’s astrology or a fad diet, never stopping to ask, “Does this even work?”

Spoiler: it doesn’t. Annual and mid-year reviews are tick-box exercises, backward-looking, bureaucratic charades that everyone dreads and no one finds valuable. So what’s the alternative? Ditch the pantomime (oh yes you should) and build a culture of continuous, real-time feedback that actually helps your team get better week by week.

The pointless ritual of the mid-year review

Let’s paint the picture. You slog your guts out for six months, then sit down for your mid-year review expecting a pat on the back. Instead, the “feedback” lands like a sucker punch from Mike Tyson. You didn’t meet expectations. You fell short. And the kicker? It’s the first time you’re hearing about these issues. Sound familiar? Sadly, it happens all the time. I spoke to a senior manager at a big bank who thought he was smashing it – regular chats with his boss, no red flags – then at the annual appraisal he was blindsided with a list of shortcomings. Demoralised doesn’t begin to cover it. This is a scene straight out of the corporate playbook, and it’s utterly bonkers. If someone’s underperforming, why the hell would you wait six months to tell them? By then, the damage is done. They’ve been misfiring for half a year, blissfully unaware, and you’ve lost six months of potential improvement.

Think of it like a race for a sporting title (or, in the case of my beloved Newcastle United, the recent scramble for a Champions’ League place). No football manager waits until the end of the season to know if they’re winning. They check the league table every week. They give the hairdryer treatment at half-time, not months later when the season’s over. Imagine (Sir) Eddie Howe saying, “We’ll discuss your awful defending in our six-month review in December.” The team would be relegated by then! It’s equally absurd in business. People need feedback in the moment, when it can actually make a difference – not in a dusty conference room six months after the fact.

Why waiting six months is too late

Aside from the obvious fact that memories fade (who can even remember the details of a project from seven months ago?), the biggest issue with infrequent reviews is what my podcast guest Ray D’Cruz called “recent memory syndrome.” Ray is the CEO of a performance management software firm, and when he appeared on my pod, he flagged that if managers rely solely on annual or semi-annual reviews, all sorts of biases creep in. They only remember the last few weeks of activity (the recency bias), or they let one big incident – good or bad – cloud the whole evaluation. It’s inevitable, because they haven’t been checking in regularly with their people. They’re essentially flying blind for months and then trying to land the plane with an emergency review at the end. Not exactly a recipe for fairness or accuracy.

Ray shared that some companies are finally waking up to this. In fact, he’s helping professional services firms move away from the annual performance review towards more continuous, 360-degree feedback that pulls in real input from clients and colleagues in real time. The traditional once-a-year talk just doesn’t cut it. He told me there are ways to make formal reviews useful – if they’re part of an ongoing conversation and not the only conversation. But too often, they’re a stand-alone event, and managers treat them as a dump for all the feedback they’ve been hoarding. Cue the overwhelmed employee thinking, “Why didn’t I hear this sooner?!”

Here’s the brutal truth: if the first time someone hears about a problem is at their six-month review, you’ve failed as a manager. Full stop. Managers who say “I’ll feed back at their appraisal in two months’ time” instead of addressing an issue now are making a huge mistake. Why wait? Give the feedback when it’s needed – now, not later. It’s about moving from retrospective criticism to real-time coaching. Think of it as the difference between a post-match autopsy and an in-game adjustment. One comes when it’s too late; the other might actually save the game.

The continuous feedback culture: coaching every week

The only way a mid-year review has any real value is if it contains zero surprises. And that only happens when you’ve been giving feedback continuously all along. The mid-year conversation then becomes a recap, just one part of the rhythm, a chance to reflect, recognise achievements, and plan ahead – not the first and only airing of grievances.

A continuous feedback culture starts with something as simple as a weekly 1:1 check-in between every employee and their manager. Ten minutes, once a week – that’s the magic formula. In fact, management guru Marcus Buckingham studied this at Cisco and found that when managers checked in weekly, productivity soared. When they did it monthly, performance dipped. And if they left it six weeks or more – forget it, performance actually declined. The message couldn’t be clearer: if you’re not meeting with your team members weekly, you might be better off not bothering at all.

Don’t just take my word for it. Gallup’s research found that only ~35% of firms have a structured process to give employees clear direction, meaning nearly two-thirds of employees are flying blind with no regular feedback. Two-thirds! No wonder so many feel disengaged. Gallup’s Chief Scientist, Jim Harter, calls the weekly check-in the single most powerful management tool. It provides three things employees crave: Clarity (do I know what’s expected of me?), Recognition (is my good work noticed?), and Course Correction (when I go off track, does someone help me back on?). You can’t deliver those once a year or even twice a year – it’s got to be frequent and on-the-fly.

Performance coaching in real time, not after the fact

A culture of continuous feedback isn’t about telling everyone how fabulous they are. It actually allows you to be tougher and more effective as a leader, because issues are addressed early and head-on. Take underperformers: in a traditional system, a manager might avoid confronting a poor performer until the formal review (“We’ll deal with John’s attitude problem at the mid-year appraisal.”). By then, John’s bad habits are ingrained and the conversation is explosive. In a continuous feedback culture, you’d raise concerns as soon as they surface – week by week – and give John a chance to improve before it’s too late.

I had former professional poker champion and decision-making expert Annie Duke on my podcast a few years back, and she shared a brilliant approach for handling poor performance. Don’t wait and let it fester. Sit the person down now and ask, “Do you think this is working out?” Most of the time, they’ll admit it isn’t. They’re not stupid; they know when they’re underperforming. Then, together agree on a 60-day improvement plan with clear targets, and check in every single week on their progress. As Annie told me, about 60% of underperformers will actually opt to resign during that process. Why? Because the continual honest feedback either spurs them to improve or makes it obvious the role isn’t for them, so they bow out. Either way, you’ve avoided a drawn-out saga. The key was having those frank weekly conversations and not bottling everything up for one grand confrontation in a review meeting six months later. By then, it’s game over. As Annie’s advice shows, real-time feedback isn’t just “nice to have” – it’s a practical tool for managing performance and even gracefully managing people out when needed.

Stop the annual farce – feedback like you mean it

So, how do you make sure your six-monthly reviews add real value? By making them redundant. If you establish continuous feedback, your team won’t be nervously waiting six months to “know the score” – they’ll know if they’re winning this week. Metrics and objectives will be discussed frequently (we favour setting FAST goals – Frequently discussed, Ambitious, Specific, Transparent – rather than static annual targets). Progress will be tracked openly, maybe with simple scorecards that get updated weekly so everyone can see how they’re doing. When everyone knows the score, there’s no need for the suspense of a biannual review reveal. No one’s walking around in the dark for months on end.

Contrast that with a culture of immediacy. A culture where feedback is just part of daily work life – straightforward, timely, and honest (with a dash of compassion). Managers in such cultures don’t shy away from tough conversations, they embrace them as part of the job. They coach, they question, they listen. Employees know where they stand because someone’s telling them in real time. Good behaviour gets recognised on the spot. Poor performance gets addressed next Monday at the latest, not six months later. The result? Higher engagement, better performance, and no need for the annual shock-and-awe report card. If you’re not using continuous feedback to drive real change, then all those HR processes are just corporate theatre. And who has time for theatre when there’s real work to do?

In the end, I’m not literally saying cancel all your mid-year review meetings (well, maybe I am, but if HR asks, you didn’t hear it from me). The point is to radically redefine their role. Turn them from review into preview. Use them to talk about the future, career development, big-picture goals – not to rehash issues that should have been dealt with in the moment. If you’ve been giving continuous feedback, nothing in the review should be a surprise. It becomes a valuable reflection and planning session rather than a dreaded judgement day. That’s how a six-monthly review can actually add value: by being one more touchpoint in a constant conversation, instead of an isolated report from six months on planet Mars.

So, stop doing performance reviews – at least, stop doing them the way we’ve all been taught. Scrap the annual farce. Replace it with genuine, frequent interactions. Treat feedback not as a formality but as a daily habit. Your team will thank you. Your business will thrive. And you can finally drive a stake through the heart of the mid-year review boredom-fest. Continuous, real-time feedback – that’s how you make performance management actually work for your people and your bottom line. Just ask Eddie Howe.

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Written by business coach and leadership coaching expert Dominic Monkhouse. Contact him to schedule a call here. You can order your free copy of his book, Mind Your F**king Business here.