Employee Performance Review Time

What are employee performance reviews all about? 

Employee performance reviews are all about gaining a shared understanding between a manager and their employee of:

• What work has to be done
• How the work is to be done (which includes information, resources or riding instructions);
• How you will know that it has been successfully completed
• The strengths, challenges and interests of the employee
• Areas for improvement
• Any rewards and incentives for great performance.

The emphasis is for any employee performance review should be on shared understanding. They are not all one way conversations where you tell the employee everything that is wrong with them.

Employee performance reviews or employee performance evaluations should be a two way conversation. You need to listen, accept feedback about yourself as well as provide feedback to your employee.

The 4 stages of performance appraisal 

All performance management systems in business are made up of just four basic stages.

These 4 stages are:

1. Setting clear goals or targets
2. Undertaking the work
3. Reviewing how the work went against the goals or targets
4. Setting new goals or targets

Most performance review systems focus on step 3 and forget the rest of the stages, but each stage is important if you want to get the best out of your employees.

However ... there is one step that underpins all of these stages and without it your employee performance reviews will fail. You need to form strong relationships with your employees before you undertake any form of performance appraisal.

Employee performance reviews will only be as deep and as productive as your relationship with your employee. If your relationship is shallow or strained the performance review will also be shallow and strained. So, before you leap into any performance review processes take the time to get to know each member of your team.

It's not about the forms! 

Employee performance reviews are not about filling in forms. They are about having a discussion between an employer and their employee and coming up with shared understanding.

Too many employee performance review processes focus on filling in forms, clicking on websites to tick boxes and filing reams of paper. Those sort of processes totally miss the point! Forms are essentially irrelevant - they just summarise the discussion and the outcomes. They are not an outcome in themselves.

Aside from that, it is really hard to listen and engage in conversation if you are focussed on writing things down or clicking on a computer screen! Focus on the person sitting with you; reflect on their observable behaviours and their future goals and targets. If you have to - lose the paper until the end of the review if that makes it easier to focus on the person first and the paper second.

No Surprises!

If your employee is surprised by your feedback during the review, you are not conducting your employee performance review correctly. If the employee is surprised you are the one who has failed! 

My motto is there should be no surprises during a review. If you have successfully done your job as a manager during the year and had regular feedback sessions with your employee, they should know exactly what you think of their performance before they walk into their review.

Remember the "no surprises" rule during the year and the reviews will be much more productive.

Focus on observable behaviours 

When giving feedback, focus only on directly observable behaviours. By that I mean comments such as "You were late back from lunch for the past 3 Fridays" compared to "I think you are out getting drunk every Friday".

By focusing on the behaviours you will be better placed to correct the issue. The second you drop into hearsay, assumption or generalisations - the power of your performance review sinks into the ground.

Keep your feedback specific, detailed and observed.

Get your process understood & documented 

Whatever process you use to do performance reviews with your employees, you need to have it documented, shared and understood by your employees.

They need to know exactly what the process will be, what to expect, how to participate to the best of their ability, how you will assess their performance, what outcomes will come from the review and what sort of things will go on their personnel file.

The more open you are about the process, the better the review will be as the employee will be less stressed.

Ingrid Cliff is a Human Resources Writer who is the author of Instant HR Policies and Procedures and Employee Performance Reviews: Tips, Templates & Tactics.