The score disappears; the judgment does not. It may move into pay decisions, talent reviews and private labels, while the replacement remains hard to see.
For the CHRO, HR leader or business leader who owns the performance system. Article 6 of seven in the performance management investigation.
The announcement is popular. No more numbers, no more distribution, more conversation. Then the first pay round arrives, and someone has to decide who gets what.
Whatever makes that decision is the new rating. The question is whether anyone can see it.
Where the judgment goes
Removing the score does not remove the decisions that used it.
Pay still has to be allocated. Promotions still have to be decided. Succession still needs a view on who is ready. And somewhere in most companies there is a grid, usually nine boxes, where people are placed by performance and potential before a talent discussion.
So ask the practical question of your own organization: if there are no ratings, what data goes into that grid? Who decides what travels into the room where careers are discussed, and on what basis?
As practitioners we have observed, and this is not a research finding: in the organizations we have worked in, the answer is often a manager's summary, formed in a conversation the employee never sees, using words that function exactly like a rating and carry none of its accountability. Some companies go further and keep an internal label purely for administration, without communicating it. That is not dishonesty so much as drift, and it is the most common outcome of a removal that was never designed.
The quiet reintroduction
Several well known organizations that removed ratings later reintroduced something rating-shaped: a simplified scale, a talent designation, a performance snapshot.
We have not found a study that counts how often this happens, which is itself worth saying. The field's own centenary review frames progress as an open question 3. The practitioner literature is full of removal announcements and almost silent on what happened three years later. If you know of a study that follows organizations through both moves, write to us and we will publish it.
What we can say is why it recurs. The decisions that need a comparable judgment did not go away, and when the formal instrument disappears, the comparison migrates to places with less structure and less recourse.
What travels into the talent room
Most companies hold a talent review once or twice a year. People get placed on a grid, usually performance against potential, and careers move on the back of it.
Three questions decide whether that room is fair, and none of them is about the rating scale.
What data goes in? If ratings are gone and nothing replaced them, the input is whatever the manager says in the meeting, weighted by how well they say it.
Who can contest it? A rating can be appealed. A characterization in a closed room usually cannot, because the person does not know it was made.
What happens to the record? If the grid position is written down and the reasoning is not, next year's discussion starts from a label with no evidence attached, and the label hardens.
As practitioners we have observed: an organization that removes ratings and keeps the talent grid has not removed the judgment. It has removed the part the employee could see, and kept the part they cannot.
What a replacement has to carry
Before removing the score, check that the replacement covers what the score was quietly doing.
- A way to explain a pay decision in words the person accepts
- A record that survives a manager leaving
- A standard two managers would apply the same way
- A route for someone to question a judgment they believe is wrong
- Someone who owns the explanation when it is contested
- A place where work across team boundaries still gets seen
Most removal programs do the first conversation well and the fourth badly. If an employee cannot challenge a judgment they cannot see, the system has become less fair while feeling more humane. That is the part the literature on fair process would predict 4.
What the fullest account actually shows
The best documented large removal is a company's own description of what it put in place instead 1: regular check-ins, a written record, and compensation decisions that continued to be made.
Note what that is. An organization describing its own design, not an independent study, with no verified claim about productivity or retention. What it does show is the useful part. Removal was not a subtraction. It was a replacement, and the replacement was the work.
The published debate adds the point that matters most for anyone considering this 2: evaluation does not stop when the score does. It moves, and the design question is where you want it to live.
What the evidence supports, and how far
The fullest account of a large removal is first-party, describing the replacement and the compensation decisions that continued 1. The published debate sets out what remains when formal ratings disappear 2. The field's centenary review still frames progress as an open question 3. How decisions are made and explained has a large literature of its own 4.
The reintroduction pattern and the talent-room argument are ours, drawn from practice. We have not found a study that counts either, and we would publish one if a reader has it.
Evidence: observed. Organizational accounts, not controlled comparisons.
Our position
Do not remove the rating until you have built its replacement, in writing. If the judgment will still be made in a talent room, removal has only made it invisible.
Take it into the room: the Replace the rating worksheet turns this article into one printed page of questions, a framework and a table to fill in.
What would change this conclusion
Independent follow-up of several organizations before and after removal, tracking where the judgment went, whether employees could still understand and question decisions, and how many reinstated a rating within three years. Evidence that removal alone improved pay fairness, with no replacement built, would genuinely surprise us and we would say so.
Read next: What should we retain, redesign, or remove?
Evidence map
- Adobe, How Adobe Continues to Inspire Great Performance and Support Career Growth. First-party organizational account; relevant full webpage sections accessed. An account of a design, not outcome evidence.
- Adler and colleagues (2016), Getting Rid of Performance Ratings: Genius or Folly? A Debate. Published debate; relevant full text accessed.
- DeNisi and Murphy (2017), Performance appraisal and performance management: 100 years of progress? Journal of Applied Psychology. Record and title verified; abstract not retrievable through the sources checked.
- Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson and colleagues (2001), Justice at the millennium. Journal of Applied Psychology. Record and title verified; abstract not retrievable. Cited for the existence and scale of the fair-process literature.
Sources checked September 22, 2026. Prepared with AI assistance.