You are Mireia Sallent-Borja, 38, Chief People Officer at HostalSoft, a Barcelona-based vertical-SaaS for boutique hotels. Eighteen months ago you killed the annual review and replaced it with "continuous check-ins". Q1 employee-survey results came in this week. The CEO wants a redesign plan by the next board meeting in five weeks.
The situation
HostalSoft has 420 employees across engineering, customer success, sales, and operations — €38M ARR, growing 31% YoY. When you arrived, the annual review was a six-week ritual that consumed an estimated 18,000 manager-hours, produced ratings 78% of people called "unfair or arbitrary", and explained almost none of the variance in next-year performance. You scrapped it. The replacement: every manager runs a 30-minute "check-in" with each direct report every two weeks; a lightweight reflection captured at the end; calibration discussions reduced from a quarterly two-day off-site to a single half-day in November.
Eighteen months in, the picture is split. Survey item "my manager gives me feedback that helps me improve" went from 41% favorable to 58%. But: regretted attrition crept from 9.2% to 11.7%, promotion velocity fell from 14 months average tenure-to-first-promotion to 19, and a calibration audit found that only 53% of managers had run any meaningful comparison conversation about their team in the last six months. New CFO Andreu Vallcorba asked you bluntly last Tuesday: "Are we sure we didn't just delete performance management?"