It’s no secret that many employees dread performance reviews. What is surprising, however, is that the very people who help promote them in companies dislike them too.

Nearly half of human resources managers don’t think annual performance reviews are accurate appraisals of employee performance, according to a recently released survey by the Society of Human Resource Management and Globoforce, an employee recognition company. 

The poll found that 45 percent of HR leaders thought reviews weren’t good gauges of a worker’s performance, compared to 39 percent last year. The increase points to “a more heightened concern from HR leaders about the shortfalls of traditional performance management,” said Globoforce CEO Eric Mosley. The email survey, taken from December 2011 through January 2012, polled 770 HR professionals who work for companies with 500 or more employees.

“Annual performance reviews continue to be the lightning rod for what’s wrong with traditional performance management,” he added.

The benefits versus the pitfalls of such reviews are part of an ongoing debate in American corporations. But there is no real movement to reassess this often-flawed management tool because it’s been around for years and is so ingrained in the workplace.

Samuel Culbert, author of “Get Rid of the Performance Review!: How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing--and Focus on What Really Matters,” is calling for the demise of performance reviews.

Culbert, a management professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, is against performance reviews because they can be demoralizing to workers, are not accurate or objective, and they use meaningless metrics.

“If it were God giving me a review that would be fair. But anyone short of God, I don’t think so,” he quipped.

When asked why employers keep administering reviews even though the recent data shows many HR managers aren’t on board, he had a list of reasons.

“Even though they hate getting and giving reviews and know they are bogus, they are comfortable with it,” he explained. “It’s the enemy they know.”

He also believes managers “love the sense of power they get from performance reviews. They like the fact that under the performance review, they are all-knowing. What they say is all that counts. Who doesn’t like that kind of power?”

And in the end, he maintained, it’s the human resources department that gets “much of its power from championing, running and having access to all the reviews. They have a lot of self-interest in preserving this ridiculous, morale-busting and results-damaging practice.”

Globoforce’s Mosley thinks it’s just a matter of habit for most employers, but he said some organizations are looking for alternatives, including “crowdsourcing feedback.”

It’s basically peer-to-peer reviews in real time, he explained. His company provides a web-based solution whereby employees and managers can nominate each other for rewards for a host of things they do at work, everything from helping out on a project to coming up with a new innovation. All that information is documented in a database, and managers can use the data to assess worker performance over a whole year, without forgetting the many contributions employees made, he said.

If crowdsourcing in the review process does catch on, employees will have more than just their boss’ opinion to worry about come review and raise season. It might be time to start playing some office politics.

Now that the economy has been adding jobs at a steady clip, more of us are ready to tell our boss to “show me the money!”

After years of seeing tiny or non-existent pay increases, employees are more optimistic than they have been in four years that employers will hop on the raise bandwagon soon, according to a study released Wednesday by Glassdoor, a job listings site.

Raise optimists outnumbered pessimists for the first time since 2008, when the website began its quarterly Employment Confidence Survey.

Among the more than 2,000 adults polled last month by Glassdoor:

• 43 percent said they expected a raise in the next 12 months.
• 38 percent said they did not.
• 46 percent said they expected their company outlook to improve in the next six months, up 6 points from three months earlier.

Is this just wishful thinking on the part of recession weary workers?Maybe not.

Raises are indeed slowly making a comeback, said Ken Abosch, group compensation leader for Aon Hewitt, a human resources consulting firm.

But don’t expect your employer to break the bank.

Aon Hewitt surveyed nearly 1,500 U.S. companies last year about expectations for pay increases in 2012 and found employers planned to pay an average raise of 2.9 percent, up slightly from 2.8 percent in 2011, although way up from the record low 1.4 percent for 2009.

“Organizations are still very concerned with the health of economy, and they’re feeling pressures of global economy,” Abosch said. Many firms, he added, “fought hard in the last few years to gain control back over their fixed costs.”

Unfortunately for you working stiffs, your base salary is a big chunk of those costs, so employers want to do everything they can to keep a lid on it.

On the bright side, he added, more employers are paying out bonuses.

“Our statistics show that 90 percent of U.S. companies are providing bonuses as far down as the person sweeping the floor in the factory,” he said. That is up from 78 percent in 2005 and about 50 percent just 15 years ago.

The Aon Hewitt survey found:

• 86 percent of employers said they would fund variable pay based on company performance this year. In some cases, however, that is being combined with reduced merit pay raises and even layoffs.
• Nearly one in five employees (19 percent) are concerned they could be laid off in the next six months, up two points from the fourth quarter after declining the preceding two quarters.
• One-third of employees are concerned coworkers could be laid off in the next six months.

“Positive economic and company indicators are driving increased optimism around pay raises and company outlook, but that optimism hasn’t yet spilled over into individual job security or view of the job market,” said Rusty Rueff, career and workplace expert for Glassdoor.

“Employers should pay attention to employee expectations around pay and be more transparent to ensure employee sentiment is aligned with reality, which will help avoid disappointment that can impact morale.”

Young adults may be facing their own version of “The Hunger Games” when entering the workforce today because they’re probably going to be hungry for more money.

Wages for young workers have been declining for more than a decade. They fell off a cliff during the Great Recession to levels not seen since the 1970s for certain groups of entry-level workers, according to new data from center-left think tank the Economic Policy Institute.

(OK, maybe it’s not exactly “The Hunger Games” just yet. In that dystopian future, depicted in a trilogy of novels and now a movie, a reality TV show follows teens fighting to their death, with the winner earning food for his/her home state. But you get our point.)

Not surprisingly, the news is worse for those with less education; and the pay gap between entry level men and women no matter what the education level is still alive and well.

Entry-level wages for high school graduates were actually lower than they were in the 1970s. For college grads, starting wages were below what their counterparts pocketed in the late 1990s. Today, the average wage for all these young adults, no matter education level, is about $15 an hour.

And whether they have a college degree or not, women still aren’t bringing home as much bacon as the men, but the gap has been narrowing. The good news, unfortunately, is partly attributable to the fact that the guys are getting paid less because of the economy.

“When the labor market is strong for workers the prospects for young workers are very strong, and when the labor market is weak their prospects are very weak,” maintained the Institute’s president Lawrence Mishel about the data that’s part of his forthcoming book ‘The State of Working America” due out in August. “The recent decade affirms this general finding, as the wages of entry-level workers have fared extremely poorly during this period of general wage stagnation.”

Here’s a breakdown of the numbers:

• The entry-level hourly wage of a young male high school graduate in 2011 was 25.3 percent less than that for the equivalent worker in 1979, a drop of roughly $4.00 per hour in 2011.
• Among women, the entry-level high school wage fell 14.2 percent over the same period, and dropped by $1.64 last year.
• Wages for high-school educated women are still far below those of their male counterparts, a gap of 15 percent.
• In 2011 the hourly wage of entry-level male college graduates was just a bit over $1.00 higher than in 1979, a rise of 5.2 percent over thirty-two years.
• Women college grads did better, with their wages growing by 15.4 percent, or $2.50, from 1979 to 2011.
• The gender pay gap among this group, however, still persists. The hourly wage for college educated men was $21.68 in 2011, compared with $18.80 for women.

Too bad young adults don't qualify for child ticket prices anymore. Adult tickets for the upcoming "The Hunger Games" movie are going for $11 a pop.

The folks on Wall Street appear to be tightening the purse strings.

A new report finds that year-end bonuses for Wall Street workers are expected to fall by an average of 20 to 30 percent this year, as compared to last year.

Blame the sluggish economy and the topsy-turvy markets. The report from Johnson Associates, a compensation consulting firm, said recent economic uncertainty and roiling world markets are driving many financial services firms to reduce the pot of money they allocate toward bonuses.

“This year started with great promise for a banner year on Wall Street, but hopes for larger bonuses faded over the summer and continue to dim as we approach year end,” Alan Johnson, managing director of Johnson Associates, said in a release announcing the results.

Wall Street bonuses also fell sharply in 2008, in the wake of the financial crisis. But they rebounded in 2009 and 2010 even as many other sectors of the economy continued to struggle.

This year, however, financial services firms also have been dragged down by the difficult economy. Some banks reported disappointing earnings in the most recent quarter, and there also have been other signs of belt tightening.

Bank of America, for example, has announced plans to lay off 30,000 workers.

The Johnson Associates report said traders and senior management are expected to see the biggest hits to their bonuses. Some Wall Street workers, such as those dealing with very wealthy clients, could still see a slight bump in bonuses.

The company bases its estimates on public data and its own analysis of financial institutions.

The outlook for 2012 isn't so cheery for U.S. bankers, either. Johnson Associates said it expected firms to continue to cut jobs in the U.S. but add staff in emerging markets. Still, some financial services employees may see their bonuses improve.

Of course, Wall Street workers probably won't be too pinched. Even with a smaller bonus, most take home handsome salaries — something that hasn't gone unnoticed by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

In an interview with The New York Times’ DealBook, Johnson said he expects people to continue to focus heavily on how much money Wall Street workers make, especially in light of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Johnson told The New York Times that Wall Street executives “haven’t gotten the memo at all.”

American workers may get a slight raise in 2012, but the weak economy will likely still keep employers from getting too generous with the pay increases.

That’s according to a new survey from Towers Watson, a professional services firm. The company found U.S. employers are planning to increase pay for salaried, nonexecutive employees by an average of 2.8 percent next year.

Employees who are paid by the hour can expect an average 2.7 percent increase, according to the survey.

That’s up slightly from an average increase of 2.6 percent this year and the year before, according to Towers Watson, which surveyed 773 U.S. companies earlier this summer to get the data. The results included those who plan no increases.

A separate survey from earlier this year, which was also conducted by Towers Watson but used a smaller group of companies, found that employers were expecting to offer slightly higher raises this year. Since then, however, many people have grown more pessimistic about the economy.

A similar study by another firm, Mercer, found that employees should expect a 3 percent raise next year — as long as they perform.

Even a small raise might be good news for many Americans who feel like they are working harder than ever. The push to do more has left many workers feeling pretty unhappy. 

If you are lucky enough to have a job, you should see a base pay increase of about 3 percent next year, about the same as this year’s projected 2.9 percent, according to a new survey. But pay increases will vary according to performance as companies try to retain top talent while struggling with anemic revenue growth in a sluggish economy, according to the report from Mercer, a consulting firm.

“Differentiating salary increases based on performance has become a necessity with limited resources,”  said Catherine Hartmann, a principal with Mercer. “In this less-than-robust environment, top-performing employees are an employers’ competitive weapon and they are doing their best to reward them accordingly.”

As a result more than two-thirds of employers in the survey said they use some type of pay-for-performance  program to differentiate pay and retain top talent. And the gap in pay between the highest and lowest-performing employees is likely to widen.

Top-rated employees are likely to see average pay raises of 4.4 percent, while the lowest-rated employees typically will see pay virtually unchanged.

Mercer surveys 1,200 large and midsized employees representing 12 million workers for the annual survey, which has been done for more than 20 years. For more details on the survey, click here.

Most recent graduates are stuck taking lower-paying jobs that are less likely to offer health insurance, according to a Rutgers University poll.

Just over half of the 571 graduates of public and private four-year schools surveyed by the school have full-time jobs, while just under half said their first jobs didn’t really require bachelor’s degrees. Nearly half said their parents are helping them financially.

The college graduates in the poll left school between 2006 and 2010. The survey found that those who graduated between 2006 and 2008 fared better than those who graduated in 2009 or 2010. The earlier grads were paid about $3,000 a year more in their first jobs, and 88 percent of them received health insurance, compared with 77 percent of the more recent grads.

The findings of the poll were reported by the Associated Press.