Say Goodbye to the Annual Check-Up

How do you know how you’re doing?

For as long as I can remember, the primary way to answer the question “How am I doing?” has been to go to your annual check-up. Once a year, you book an appointment, sit in the waiting room, and see the doctor. In the days leading up to your appointment, you stop eating ice cream and start eating salad in the hope that it will skew your results. The appointment is inconvenient, it’s cold, you get your blood drawn, and no one on planet Earth looks forward to it.

A few weeks later, you get your results and are deemed healthy or not, and they say, “See you next year.” If you’re extremely diligent, you may see other specialists over the course of the year, and at every appointment they look at you and conclude that, at this point in time, when they are seeing you, you seem okay.

Now, let’s think through how you know how you’re doing professionally. If someone approached your boss and said, “How is Mark doing?” how would your boss know what to say? Much like your physical health, your professional aptitude is measured once a year in a process that everyone hates. It’s equally cold and inconvenient, and much like your check-up, it’s usually based on your last three weeks of behavior rather than your full body of work.

After your boss procrastinates for a few weeks and likely breezes through generic questions about your performance, you are forced to sit through the results, where you’ll likely find out you’re doing okay. See you next year.

But hasn’t software been built to help improve this?

In the medical world—until recently—software wasn’t built to fix this process. Instead, software was built to aid and abet it. Epic, Athena, and MyChart all built systems to keep the records from your annual check-ups in one place. Come in once a year and your doctor can see how you were last year. If you switch doctors, they’ll get access to your records so they can see how you were last year.

Businesses implemented a similar strategy. Companies like Lattice, 15Five, Workday, and Rippling built tools to manage the workflows of the existing process. Everyone runs performance reviews; we’ll build the workflow to run them. Performance reviews are essentially your professional version of a chart—a record that follows you from boss to boss. A list of things you did well a year ago that may or may not be related to how you’re doing today.

So let’s pose the same question we started with and assume we can only answer it using legacy systems.

Would your chart know how you are feeling today? Absolutely not.

Would your performance review from last year know how you’re doing in your job today? Absolutely not.

The future of answering the question: “How are you doing?”

AI has changed the equation in the medical world, and we anticipate a similar shift in the professional world. A combination of new hardware and software has enabled people to track their vitals every day. Your annual check-up still exists, but your Apple Watch can tell you everything you need to know about your core vitals. Companies like Function, Superpower, and Whoop can track pivotal health metrics on a daily basis, giving you the ability to answer the question “How are you doing?” with accuracy—and provide an up-to-the-minute dashboard with guidance on how to improve.

The same principles can be applied to professional performance. The future of performance management isn’t just improved tools for running performance reviews. Instead, it’s reimagined tooling that allows you to measure, evaluate, and improve performance in real time. Windmill can combine your digital vitals, your work, your 1:1s, your feedback and your evaluations into a system that is always available and always helping. That is the future of performance management. That is autonomous management.