I was listening to a Tech in Chicago interview with Landon Shoop, the founder of Fizz (www.gofizzgo.com), a Chicago startup that is marketed as “on-going, on-demand feedback.” From what I understand, Fizz is one of the growing services that intend to replace annual reviews with something more friendly and increase the effectiveness of the review process.

Landon described the Fizz solution as allowing the employee to document accomplishments in small “tweets” that create a record of the employee’s work over the entire period of the review. In addition, the manager is encouraged to rate the small accomplishments on one of three levels (basically, it is either great, ok or bad). In the end, the vision is to create much more interaction around employee accomplishments (and ratings by managers) and reduce the pressure of an annual review process.

One of the facets of the Fizz solution that I like is the emphasis on frequent capture of data. The high frequency (captured in tweet-sized bites) this solution encourages translates into a higher volume of documented accomplishments. An increase in the volume of data to use for reviews is a good step forward. You don’t need a system like Fizz to continuously capture your accomplishments and include this data on your self-review come review time. You can do it on your own even without this platform.

I started the process of collecting accomplishments throughout the year on my staff when I was working for a large company with a bi-annual review process. I wrote statements of impact and value I observed every quarter throughout the quarter. I summarized the best statements when I was making promotion arguments. The document was invaluable when it came time to write my reviews. My staff knew I was paying attention, and advocating for them with the documentation of value I was creating.

Let’s take a moment to remember the purpose of performance reviews. Performance reviews are a process for the organization to keep track of how well their talent is doing. Performance reviews are not a mechanism to improve an employee and make him or her successful. Some organizations do performance reviews as often as every quarter. This still isn’t frequent enough to enable individuals on your team to improve fast enough. Your role as a technical leader extends beyond the performance review if you want to improve your team performance.

The downfall I see with a system like Fizz is the emphasis placed on “rating” instead of improvement. The manager can rate the accomplishments as good or bad. In the end there is data that shows what the employee did and how the manager rates those accomplishments. It removes the mystery surrounding “how does my manager rate my performance?” It also creates defensible documentation when you have to terminate someone. It does nothing to provide support to an employee that wants to improve.

An effective way to support improvement is to use feedback that includes “cause and effect.” Articulate to your employees what they did and whether the result is positive or negative outcome. This type of feedback isn’t a rating, it is much more of a learning instrument. An employee that receives this type of feedback has the opportunity to choose what to do next time informed by this “cause and effect” conversation.

I remember learning the lesson of feedback frequency when I was frustrated by the slow progression of one of my staff members. I had a manager that wasn’t improving quickly enough on the monthly reports he was providing to me and my boss. I realized that I wasn’t providing feedback on his reports even every month, and the time between the reports made the progress crawl. I changed the process and asked for a report every week to me where I would provide detailed feedback. Only once a month would that report go to my boss. Changes were made every week based on my feedback, and the end-result to my boss was a higher quality result.

You must ask yourself, are you giving your team this kind of cause and effect feedback often enough that the individuals on your team can make adjustments every week? How quickly do you want your team to get better? Do you want your team to get better every week? Many of us don’t give feedback frequently enough, certainly not in line with our expectations of improvement.