Tim Paradis

Big picture here, what are performance reviews really about?

Are they about fairness, about giving people recognition, or are they kind of about employer control, like who they can lay off, who they can tag as underperformers and try to get them to improve?

Which one is it, or is it more complicated than that?

It's kind of both.

Well, I'm going to take the audio from this interview, Tim, feed it into an AI, and we'll get some feedback on how well it went.

How does that sound?

Sounds fantastic.

Can't wait to read it.

Tim Parity is a future work correspondent at Business Insider.

You can read his article about this called Why So Many Companies Are Rethinking Performance Reviews.

Tim, it's been a joy chatting with you.

Thanks for being on the show.

Well, thanks for having me, David.

You know, it's funny, at least in certain firms, it seems to be the thing, right?

We said in the piece, like if 2025 was about calling workers to really go above and beyond, 2026 is about making sure they do it.

So, yeah, it'll be really interesting to see how this plays out.

I mean, in some ways,

the sense we got was that it was almost like sort of maybe bringing practices that had been existing in other industries to silicon valley a little bit more making a little bit more widespread so thinking like you mentioned at the top you know tracking badge swipes so making sure people are actually in the office complying with you know return to office mandates or

Just looking at Amazon, for example, a colleague of mine reported that they're looking more at individual accomplishments.

Not that they hadn't done it before, but they're looking closer at, okay, what are the things you actually did?