Welcome to the Zal.ai Thought Leadership Series, where we explore how forward-thinking HR leaders are reimagining workplace practices for the modern era. Each interview features senior practitioners who aren't just adapting to change, but sharing from their experiences.

Throughout our first series of publications, one tension surfaces again and again: How do you humanize performance reviews while keeping them fair? Leaders want to create space for quality feedback conversations where employees feel seen and heard, where each review is tailored to the unique manager-employee relationship. But they also need equity and consistency. If every performance review is customized to each relationship, how do we ensure fairness across an organization? If two employees perform at the same level but have different managerial dynamics, how do we ensure both have a similar path to success?

In this installment, Desiree Therianos, Advisor for The Joy Agenda, tackles this challenge head-on. Her approach offers a pathway to achieve what seems impossible: the perfect balance between standardization and customization. To her, it's all about creating an iterative structure.

Fairness as Scaffolding for Customization

“I think people get a little afraid when they hear that we are customizing the performance review process for them. They worry it means the process won’t be fair — that customization equals favoritism,” Therianos says. “The only way to move past that fear is to show how your strategy aligns with a clear, tactical evaluation framework.”

When people don’t know what excellence looks like, they don’t feel evaluated — they feel judged.

In fast-paced startup environments, roles evolve quickly. Priorities shift. Teams scale. And in that chaos, many managers default to relying on the formal performance review process as the primary mechanism for accountability.

The problem? A process is not the same thing as guidance.

Too often, managers assume employees will self-direct their growth between review cycles. Employees are told to “own their development,” but they are rarely given a stable definition of what outstanding performance looks like in a moving environment.

Research consistently shows that only about half of employees clearly understand what is expected of them at work. Even fewer feel that performance reviews meaningfully help them improve. When growth is left largely to self-navigation, advancement often favors those who are most vocal or most confident — not necessarily those who are most capable.

Fairness does not mean sameness.Fairness means clarity.

The framework of performance management must be built on equity and transparency. When leaders level-set expectations across departments — defining scope, impact, autonomy, and behavioral standards — they create scaffolding. That scaffolding makes customization possible.

Because customization without structure feels arbitrary.  Customization built on shared criteria feels empowering. Every employee should have an equal opportunity to succeed. The performance appraisal process is not meant to be a once-a-year judgment. It is a tool to clarify expectations, reduce bias, and give employees a tangible pathway toward growth.

Managers cannot outsource development to a form. They must pair structure with coaching.

In high-growth companies especially, fairness is not automatic. It must be architected.

So how do we marry the two? Therianos says that equity must be the structure or scaffolding that allows for customization:

"[Performance management] needs to be built and based on equity. But the customization comes into play when you enable a manager to take more of the detailed data on the employee and tailor the review process toward them."

A foundation of fairness allows for bespoke and mutually beneficial feedback conversations, contributing to team development and company success. However, Therianos explains, this balance can only be achieved if HR leaders subscribe to three core principles:

1. Align on Excellence

"A lot of companies say they have a very high bar, but they don't define that bar. Then it becomes very frustrating for the employee to go through a process where you get a ranking, but you don't understand where you are in relation to the bar of success," she says.

Because of this, Therianos starts every performance management plan with the same question: "How do we define excellence?"

She recognizes that the answer to this question can be vastly different depending on role, but it is imperative for every member of the organization to understand what success looks like. This is the foundation of the fairness scaffolding. If success is clearly defined across the business, employees can be confident that they will be evaluated by the same parameters as their peers.

Therianos takes this one step further: "It's one thing for leadership to know it, but if you can't convey it to your people, you have a problem." No one can achieve if no one knows what the bar looks like, so clear expectation-setting is crucial for creating an equitable platform for the performance review.

2. Normalize Questioning the Norm

To Therianos, HR leaders need to embrace the challenge of innovation in this period of rapid technological growth: "Because performance reviews are formalized, people feel they need psychological safety. I want to reiterate for my team that innovation is okay."

Because of the compensation ramifications of performance appraisals, HR departments are often afraid to iterate on the process. However, if it's clear that the process is not effective in communicating success and evaluating performance, it should be changed. Therianos urges leaders to question how this process can better serve employees, managers, and the company as a whole.

By continuously iterating on the performance review process, leadership is defining and redefining departmental expectations. In doing so, they are continuously level-setting performance and building a responsive fairness scaffolding. By continuously tailoring the performance review process, leadership allows managers to more easily meet their employees' specific needs at the time of the appraisal, creating an environment for effective personalization.

3. Intention is Imperative

"Customization comes in the conversations that follow after implementing a performance review process. We do the process because it is a process, but how we iterate on that process is key to how we differentiate our company and inspire someone to continue their growth plan.

I tell managers that this is not a set-it-and-forget-it process, it is one part of a whole journey for our company and all of its employees."

Therianos is looking to build performance evaluation models that are fluid and ever-changing to meet the company's needs. A performance culture can only be built if HR leaders are continuously acting with intention. To her, a good performance evaluation process is not defined by a single success, but by how continued success creates a workplace of achievement. In order to accomplish this, leadership must continue to question their own actions and move forward with a clear idea of their goals for the process.

From Anxiety to Alignment… and Even Joy

When Therianos says her goal is "to bring joy back into doing reviews," it sounds almost contradictory. Joy? In performance reviews?

Yet the results speak for themselves. At Hopper and in the advisory work Therianos has done at Rainbow, managers spent an entire leadership debrief talking enthusiastically about the review process, something Therianos had never witnessed in 20+ years of startup HR. Engineers volunteered ideas for integrating feedback tools into daily work. Not a single employee protested at the end of the cycle.

What changed? The courage to sit with discomfort in service of something better.

By approaching performance reviews with clear expectations, the courage to challenge norms, and intentional flexibility, organizations can transform the most anxiety-inducing process in HR into a tool for understanding, growth, and genuine alignment. When performance reviews prevent miscommunication and frustration, they become something more powerful: a mechanism for continuously redefining roles, competencies, and ultimately, the nature of work itself.

The technology exists to humanize performance management. The real question is whether we're brave enough to reimagine what's possible.

Because on the other side of that courage? That's where joy lives.