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.