Performance reviews: implementing a painless review process

Did you know that a quarter of employees dread performance reviews more than anything else in their work lives? Make sure your team doesn’t fall into that 25 percent!

In a recent webinar, Paycor HR business partners Becky Falvey and Lauren Ammon offered six tips for managing your team’s performance, with a focus on making the review process a true opportunity to develop employees in an ongoing way, and not just an awkward meeting once a year.

1. Keep it Simple
First things first: Don’t overcomplicate the process. Instead of worrying too much about numbers and scores, focus on an employee’s overall value. The goal of the review is to generate meaningful, candid conversations.

2. Find a Balance
Whether you want to improve a low-performing employee or encourage a high performer to keep up the good work, balance is crucial to the conversation. Reviewers should assess both what has happened in the performance period and what can be done going forward. It’s also important to reaffirm what went well and explain what future success looks like.

Be sure to consider:

Accomplishments: Where did the employee excel? With whom and under what circumstances?
Challenges: Where can you find opportunities to grow in the next year? What obstacles did the employee face and have to overcome?

Three other keys to a balanced review:

Focus on skills and behaviors, not the person. Restrict comments to what happened and what the outcome was so employees understand the review is about their work, not their personality or character.

Cite specific examples. Employees will quickly dismiss general statements that lack a reference to a particular project, instance or outcome. Use language that clearly explains the result of what an employee did or did not do. In positive cases, specific examples will help your team know how to duplicate great behavior!

Include action steps. Don’t assume an employee knows what to do better or differently—or even how to keep doing well. Be clear about what works, what doesn’t and what you want to see from your employee.

3. Introduce Crowdsourcing
A complete review includes more opinions than just the immediate manager’s. That means sourcing feedback from an employee’s teammates and collaborators, including those from other departments and areas of responsibility.And of course, don’t forget about the employee! Make sure he or she contributes to the review process with a self-assessment and has an opportunity to be heard face to face, as well.

4. Set Goals
State 5-6 goals for the next review period, and include both business and non-financial, personal objectives. Make sure expectations and measurements are clearly defined and understood.

5. Check in Regularly
There are three ways to keep the communication open in a candid and consistent way: one-on-one meetings to assess goals and touch base, personal development meetings to ask the question “How are you?” instead of “How are you doing at work?”, and on the job observations which is the most effective way to accurately assess performance. Keep the candid conversation flowing through all three of these meetings.

6. After the review: Calibrate
Remember: the review process is ongoing! You need to calibrate and re-calibrate to determine key groups and drive action. This means categorizing top performers, developing leaders and low performers, then recalibrating later to assess development and adjust actions.

Want to learn more about implementing successful performance reviews? Contact Lily Woodard 352-224-5322

Related posts