The traditional annual review covers a lot of ground: coaching and guidance for the employee, feedback and communication, compensation, staffing decisions and professional development, legal documentation, and ultimately, improvement for both the employee and the organization.

According to Jenkins and Coens, all of the above can be done better and far less painfully by untangling these functions and designing a process for each. First, they argue, companies should decouple compensation decisions from feedback about how the employee is doing. The point is that outside, or extrinsic, motivators such as money do not really work for the vast majority of employees.

One company that found that to be true is Brighton, Mich.-based Peaker Services, which rebuilds locomotive diesel engines and does application engineering work for control systems. In the past, Peaker relied on merit raises linked to annual evaluations, according to president Ian Bradbury.