April 03, 2026
You Can’t Engage Employees With Criteria They Don’t Understand
When performance criteria are vague, generic, or overloaded, the damage runs deeper than a frustrating review cycle. New research from HR advisory firm McLean & Company finds that poorly designed evaluation frameworks are weakening trust, raising stress levels, and contributing to higher voluntary attrition, with measurable consequences for organisations that have not examined what they are actually asking employees to be assessed against.
The findings, published in McLean & Company’s Guide to Establishing Performance Criteria, show that organisations that fail to deliver a positive employee experience see voluntary turnover rates 40% higher than those that do. Data from the 2026 edition found that employees in those organisations are 1.27 times more likely to report elevated stress levels.
Three Design Failures Behind the Damage
The research identifies three recurring problems driving these outcomes. The first is over-reliance on outcome-driven metrics that ignore how work gets done. The second is the use of generic criteria that do not account for role context. The third is evaluation frameworks overloaded with too many expectations for employees to meaningfully engage with.
The cumulative effect is a loss of confidence in the process itself. When employees cannot see a credible connection between how they work and how they are evaluated, the framework stops functioning as a tool for development and becomes a source of friction instead.
According to McLean & Company’s Engagement Survey data from 2023 to 2025, employees who clearly understand their job expectations are 8.6 times more likely to be engaged in their work. The figure points to something that employee experience analytic surface: clarity of expectations ranks among the strongest individual predictors of engagement, ahead of many factors that receive more organisational attention.
The research also draws a direct line between performance management and broader HR effectiveness. HR respondents who rate their department’s performance management as highly effective are 4.7 times more likely to report having an effective employee engagement strategy, suggesting the two are less separate functions than mutually reinforcing ones.
“Performance criteria should aim to make success clearer, not more complicated,” said Leann Schneider, director of HR Research & Advisory Services at McLean & Company. “HR leaders need to define expectations that reflect both outcomes and behaviours, keep the number of criteria focused, and ensure employees can see how their work connects to broader organisational goals.”
Outcomes Alone Are Not Enough
Part of the problem is that many organisations default to what is easiest to quantify. Outcome metrics are trackable, comparable, and defensible, but they tend to obscure the behaviours that produce sustainable performance. Employees assessed purely on results are often uncertain about what good looks like beyond hitting a number, which makes it harder to course-correct, develop, and grow. Incorporating competencies, values, and role-specific expectations gives employees a more complete and actionable picture of what they are working toward.
Even frameworks built on sound principles can fail at the point of delivery. The research identifies communication as a frequent weak link. Criteria land poorly when managers are not able to explain them, address pushback, or create space for employee input. Recent research into stress and change management has shown that employees engage far more constructively with new processes when the reasoning behind them is made visible rather than handed down as a given.
“When criteria are grounded in role realities and reinforced through communication, feedback, and coaching, organisations are better positioned to support employee growth and make performance management more effective,” said Justine Czencz, Manager of HR Research & Advisory Services at McLean & Company.
