Performance reviews can cause a lot of anxiety for both the appraiser and appraisee. A good performance review can leave an employee feeling highly motivated. In contrast a performance review that is carried out badly, can leave an employee feeling disengaged and resentful, leading to lower productivity and even looking for a job elsewhere. Here are some points to consider and common pitfalls managers should avoid to ensure performance reviews are successful.
Annual performance review
An annual performance review is not adequate or frequent enough to keep in contact with your employees. Think about how often you feedback to your direct reports, weekly, monthly or only when there is a problem?
People need regular feedback and goal planning to stay focused and on track. This helps with their development, productivity and engagement. Something that you may have discussed up to a year ago, may no longer be relevant, so if you haven’t revisited and re-evaluated goals how can you expect your employee to be achieving goals and performing well?
Without regular feedback you run the risk of your people becoming disengaged and not their meeting goals.
One-way communication process
A common complaint is that employees think that the appraisal should be a conversation, but all too often they are not given the opportunity to take part. Instead they feel they are being lectured at for most of the appraisal with positive and negative feedback.
Having a two-way conversation enables both parties to assess the performance of the appraisee. It will be a collaboration with everyone having their voice heard. It also provides the manager with an opportunity to better understand things from their employee’s perspective and see where goals etc. need clarification. If you are just lecturing them how will you be able to assess if they have understood what you have said?
Learning, development and career ambitions
Another complaint from employees is that there isn’t enough focus or commitment, to developing their skills and abilities. Sometimes this is completely ignored or at other times there is a reluctance to invest financially or allow them the time to develop. How can you expect your staff to invest themselves in the business when you aren’t willing to invest in them? Of course, it is not always possible to send someone on an expensive external course, however, you need to explain your decisions and look to alternative ways to help with their learning and development, and their career path.
Ask them what they want to do and what they want to achieve. Engage with them and listen to how they would like to develop themselves or build their career. This is an effective and powerful way to work with your team, motivating them and seeing where their strengths are to help develop and strengthen the business.
Focusing on one issue
Appraisers can fall in to the trap of focusing on one issue and not someone’s overall performance. This can particularly happen when something has occurred quite recently so it is at the forefront of the appraiser’s mind. It is unfair to judge someone on one specific project or issue whether it is positive or negative. It is your responsibility as their manager to look at their overall performance and feedback on all of it.
Everything is perfect, until it’s not
If you leave a problem building up over time until someone’s performance review to tell them, they can feel blindsided and very defensive. You run the risk of really knocking their confidence and leaving them feeling alienated, angry and resentful. The last thing you want someone to do when they leave their performance review is to leave them feeling demotivated and disengaged. Regular communication and feedback is essential to preventing this from happening.
Lack of recognition
Always acknowledge the good work that they have achieved over the last year and that they are continuing to do. When people are working on something high profile, acknowledgement is often given, but what about on smaller projects and day-to-day tasks? There might well be a part of you thinking ‘well that’s what they’re paid to do’ but don’t underestimate the importance of people doing a good job and how motivating an acknowledgement of good work is. Taking a few minutes to thank someone rather than a deep undercurrent of resentment makes good business sense.
Performance reviews play a vital role in managing an employee’s performance, be sure that you and other managers have the training and tools to conduct them effectively. Regular communication and feedback are essential to their success. If you would like support on giving effective feedback and conducting performance reviews then we run a workshop that you might benefit from: https://www.dakotablueconsulting.com/what-we-do/workshops/