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Research: Performance Reviews That Actually Motivate Employeesby hJoonyoung Kim and Emily Zitek Summary. Performance reviews are an important tool to help managers and organizations motivate and engage their workforce. Narrative-based feedback provides employees with more personalized analysis and can shed light on individual paths for improvement, while numerical feedback offers clear benchmarks for employees to track and meet specific targets. In a new study, researchers examined whether one format %u2014 or a combination of the two %u2014 was seen as more fair and motivating by employees. They found that while narrative feedback is perceived as the most fair, it can be especially meaningful for those employees with room to improve. In an increasingly datadriven world, many companies, including Adobe, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs, have made the surprising move to do away with number-based performance reviews. Some have opted for more open-ended, narrative-based performance evaluations, while others have eliminated reviews completely, conducting regular %u201ccheck-ins%u201d instead. The argument for the shift away from numerical reviews is strong: