When it comes to performance reviews, many companies have a way they are (or aren’t) doing it now, but are on the lookout for best practices or new ideas to make their process better and increase the effectiveness of the tools they use. With this in mind, we bring to you a few good, bad, and ugly things to help you streamline your techniques.
The Good
Providing opportunities for regular check-ins and feedback sessions.
Performance reviews should not be an event that happens once a year, causes a lot of stress, and then is forgotten about otherwise. Set your goals early, and provide employees and managers with a forum when they can meet regularly and discuss these. One way to do this is to include scheduled feedback sessions in your process, and then make providing feedback easy in an online tool. Don’t just talk about how you encourage feedback, but put a process in place that reminds managers and helps you gather this feedback in a central location.
The Bad
Not including your employees in the process.
Performance reviews should not be a one-way street where the manager has all of the power and the employee doesn’t have a say. Yes, we want to have manager feedback, but it is equally important to involve the employee in the progress so that they understand what is expected of them and they are able to provide feedback on their own progress.
The Ugly
Having a process so confusing or hard no one does it.
When your process is so cumbersome that employees and managers don’t want to do, you will spend a lot of time nagging them to complete things, and you will probably end up with a large segment of the population who either doesn’t complete reviews on time, or doesn’t complete them at all. Make sure that the objectives of your review are clear, and make it easy for everyone to figure out what they are supposed to do and when.
For other ways to make sure that your next performance review doesn’t fall under the Bad or Ugly category use this data sheet to help you win at your next assessment.
Why is it so important that organizations set clear, well developed goals? Many of us see goal setting as a chore we must complete at the beginning of each appraisal cycle without really understanding the impact or importance of the process. If done correctly, goals can motivate employees, help align business processes and improve the overall performance of the company.
How can goals help to align employees and business units with the overall organizational business processes? There needs to be great visibility throughout the goals of the company. If realistic goals are set and there is a vast deal of information sharing during the goal creation process, goals throughout the organization will be consistent. Visibility into the organizational goals enables employees to align their own goals with those of the organization to ensure they are helping support and contribute to the future of the company. Furthermore, this can help clarify the roles of all employees in the company so they are clear in how their performance contributes to the overall success.
Not only is determining a realistic time frame a key factor in monitoring a goal, but also determining how it will be achieved and how it will be measured. In some cases, a particular goal may require several objectives to be adequately monitored. Goals without objectives are essentially meaningless because progress is impossible to measure. It is this level of specificity sets goals and objectives apart.
The bottom line is that goal setting is not just an annual exercise all employees need to go through so they can check off the box in their list of tasks to complete. Goals are critical to the success of a company and when the proper attention and priority are given to the creation of realistic goals, the outcome realized will definitely be well worth the effort invested up-front.
COMING SOON! We are excited to announce exciting new features will be available in the next release of Brilliant HR Talent Management. A few of the highlights are mentioned below. Your scheduled upgrade window is June 9 – June 11, 2017. We encourage you to notify your users that the system will be down at some point during this window while we complete your upgrade. What’s New?
Talent Acquisition
Increased Power to Satisfy Your Future Talent Needs. Flexible talent pools give recruiters the flexibility to manage private, shared, or public talent pools, and helps them further identify candidates for each talent pool by creating specific talent pool questionnaires.
Enhanced Onboarding with task management to help accelerate and improve the quality of the onboarding experience for new hires.
Improved Workflow Management allows you to quickly reassign pending approvals for job requisitions and job offers originally assigned to an employee who has since been off-boarded.
Talent Performance
Increase Employee Engagement. The ability to track and provide continuous feedback is now available and can be used standalone or to complement your annual appraisal process.
360 Appraisal Launch for Project Teams makes it even easier to evaluate team members by the projects they are engaged on.
Improved Workflow Management allows you to quickly reassign appraisal approver and appraisal manager from an employee who has been off-boarded.
Talent Learning
Improved Course Management. Streamline and consolidate options down to fewer course types: Instructor-led, E-Learning, and Read & Sign.
Integration with the SCORM Engine. Talent Learning is now integrated with the SCORM Engine to maximize support and delivery of SCORM compliant online courses.
See KB Article # 89777 for important details on how to prepare before migrating to the SCORM Engine. IMPORTANT: Deltek Talent Management is Migrating to AWS In the weeks following your upgrade, Deltek will be migrating your Talent Management site to Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is the leading cloud provider that will allow Deltek to provide you with increased scalability and availability with enhanced security, compliancy and monitoring. Please be on the lookout for additional announcements related to this migration. Note: Canadian clients currently hosted at our Canadian hosting facility will not be impacted by this at this time. What do you need to do? Watch for more detailed information about this move via email.Thank you for being a Brilliant HR Talent Management customer, we are excited to bring these changes to you to help you manage your employees. Sincerely, Brilliant HR Customer Care Contact Procedures
The fastest and best way to receive support is to submit a case online at Deltek Customer Care Connect. See KB Article # 77086 for details on Deltek Customer Care Contact Procedures.If you need to call Customer Care after you have submitted a case online, you will need your Contact ID: Your Contact ID can also be found in the upper right corner of the Deltek Customer Care Connect Site Home Page.
There are so many different ways to conduct performance reviews, but how do you know what is right for you? In many ways, it depends on why you are using performance reviews – for compliance, to determine salary increases, to measure team member success, to gather feedback, or for coaching opportunities. Below are five different types of performance reviews that you can use depending on the needs of your company and the driving factor behind why reviews are conducted.
Traditional Performance Review
When we think of the traditional performance review, we tend to think of an appraisal that runs on a schedule (usually annually) and involves the manager and employee. There can be other variations, such as mid-year reviews or the omission of the employee from the review, but the ultimate outcome from this traditional review is a score.
Some of the elements scored within the traditional review can include competencies, skills, goals, and achievements. Participants in the appraisal score appraise elements and a final score is calculated based on the feedback given by the participants.
In many cases, the scores from traditional performance reviews are used to determine top performers, as a basis for salary increases, or to document that reviews have been completed.
Project-Based Appraisal
As opposed to the traditional performance review, project-based appraisals are run at the end of an employee’s involvement on a project team to determine how that employee completed their portion of the project. Additionally, instead of the primary reviewer on the appraisal being the manager, the project lead takes on this responsibility.
Similar to the traditional performance review, these project-based appraisals can also include competencies, skills, goals, and achievements which the project team lead can review. Additionally, the participants review these items so that a final score is calculated.
Project-based appraisals are great for tracking a team’s members input in a project.
Continuous Feedback
As companies move away from score-based appraisal, continuous feedback is taking over as the way for managers and employee to track progress toward employee goals. This is an easy feedback process for when companies don’t want to use scores.
Continuous feedback provides set meeting points between the manager and employee to document notes and progress towards goals.
These are a great tool for tracking feedback, and can be combined with the traditional performance review process to give both scored and feedback based performance options.
360 Appraisal
This type of appraisal can solicit feedback from others both inside and outside of the organization that open up the review process beyond just the self and manager reviews and scores. As with the continuous feedback, this information gathered can be useful as a one-off, but also can be a great tool for getting feedback and using this as a part of the traditional performance review.
New Hire Review
New hire reviews are typically done 90 days to 6 months after start date and enables managers to review a new hire on specific competencies, skills, goals, and achievements. Both the manager and employee can be involved in tracking progress, and these are typically done at the end of a probationary period to make sure the employee is fit for the job and meeting expectations.
This review style is beneficial for giving great feedback and seeing where this new hire will excel and needs maybe more work in the role they were assigned, to hopefully help them improve and grow in the long run.
Whichever performance review works best for your company having an automated system will also be beneficial in the long run, and will help measure and keep track of everyone in one area. Read our Performance Product Guide to show what key features you should be looking when using an automated system.
