Annual performance reviews may one day become a thing of the past because they fail to engage and motivate employees. The new trend is ongoing performance management which is better suited for today's diverse and dispersed workforce.

As companies expand into new markets in the far corners of the world, and the way people work changes due to technology, the traditional annual performance appraisal system is proving to be woefully inadequate. The annual reviews were designed to point out performance flaws and support compensation decisions but did very little to provide critical feedback and certainly were not engagement tools. Neither employees nor employers liked the process. As work changes, employees become more dispersed, and employee engagement becomes critical to organizational success, corporations are moving away from annual or semi-annual performance appraisals to a performance management system in which employees are given regular feedback as a strategy for ongoing development and to strengthen engagement. The performance management system is more in tune with the needs of a global, diverse workforce that wants to understand how the work contributes to success and to improve performance through ongoing learning.