What safety culture taught me about performance reviews

The question

Human and Organizational Performance starts from a position most HR processes do not: that error is normal, that people are usually doing what makes sense given the conditions, and that blame teaches an organization nothing except to stop reporting.

Sit with that for a moment, then look at a standard performance review.

What is actually going on

The review asks what the person did or failed to do. It rarely asks what the conditions were, whether the work as imagined matched the work as done, or whether the same outcome would have happened to anyone in that seat.

In safety this gap is well understood, because the consequences are immediate and severe. On a 1,200-person power division I worked with, the shift was from counting incidents after the fact to identifying the tasks that could hurt somebody and changing the conditions around them. That surfaced 591 high-risk tasks, and 21 critical risks were either controlled or eliminated outright.

None of that came from asking people to be more careful.

The equivalent question in performance is rarely asked. When someone underdelivers, how often does the process examine the handover they inherited, the three competing priorities, or the system that was down for a fortnight?

What this means for you

This is not an argument for removing accountability. It is an argument that a process which only looks at the individual will keep finding individuals, and keep missing the system that produced them.

One change is worth trying at almost no cost. Add a single question to your review template: what would have made this easier? Then read the answers across a whole team rather than one at a time. The pattern is usually more actionable than any individual rating.

Where I can help

I have led a Human and Organizational Performance transformation across an operating division and delivered improvements across every Gallup Q12 engagement measure in the process. The two are related more tightly than most organizations expect.

Where this usually starts is not a new performance form. It is a look at what your current process actually rewards and what it quietly punishes, particularly around reporting problems early.