Instituting a less formal system poses some challenges.

Instead of tying pay increases to rankings, managers relate them to employee achievement of their goals.

Managers were trained to focus on goals, objectives, and career development. The timing of the feedback is up to the managers, consistent with Adobe’s strategy of encouraging managers to act as “business owners” of the group they lead. Instead, the company would prepare managers to carry out a practice called the Check-In, through which they provide ongoing feedback and coaching.

She announced that Adobe would go forward with abolishing performance appraisals, along with related schedules and forms. It became one of Adobe’s most popular blog posts, and comments poured in from employees who were delighted with the idea and disappointed in managers’ apparent lack of recognition of their accomplishments and failure to support their career development. On the corporate blog, Morris wrote a piece about her desire to eliminate formal performance appraisals. Every year, immediately following the feedback sessions, voluntary departures by employees spiked. Was the effort improving performance? Probably not. Morris’s team calculated that Adobe’s managers spent 80,000 hours per year on the process, equivalent to the time of 40 full-time employees. Adobe was using a process of annual reviews that ranked employees. Evidence signaled a need for change at the 11,500-employee company. During that transition, Adobe’s senior vice president of people resources, Donna Morris, wondered whether its HR systems-particularly performance management-also needed a new strategy. Recently, Adobe has been shifting its focus from packaged software programs to online software. Most people know Adobe Systems for its Photoshop software and the Acrobat and Adobe Reader programs for creating and viewing its portable document format (PDF) files.

Portable programs for usb