A 2015 survey, published in the Harvard Business Review, found that nearly two-thirds of employees were dissatisfied with performance reviews, didn’t think they were relevant to their jobs – or both. In a separate survey conducted in 2016 by Adobe, a quarter of men and nearly a fifth of women reported crying as a result of a bad review. The figures were even higher for younger workers.

And that was during the much simpler pre-pandemic times, when pretty much all professional workers were in the office daily and could be assessed similarly. Things are trickier today, as some employees work entirely from home, others come to the office and still others split their time between the two. According to recent statistics, the vast majority of companies are adopting a hybrid model, with a majority of employees saying they want to work remotely at least three days a week. However, the physical separation between employer and employee can make a performance review difficult and even disadvantage employees working from home.

Yalcin Acikgoz, associate professor of industrial-organizational psychology, a field that conducts scientific studies to better understand the workplace, presents in a recently published article the challenges that employers and their employees working primarily from home might face during performance reviews and ways to overcome them.