Your employees are freaking out over performance reviews. Here’s how to make them less stressful

Stress hormones spike in the weeks before a performance evaluation. This chief people officer says this doesn’t have to be the case.

These days, performance reviews are getting a bad rap. They’re described as “awful,” “harmful,” and getting “more stressful.” This is understandable. No one wants to feel that their entire body of achievement at work across a year can be summarized in a few paragraphs, or with a handful of adjectives that might not do justice to all the effort they put in.