Great Improvement Tool: Performance Reviews
July 22, 2008
Great Improvement Tool: Performance Reviews
By Gene Swindell
The Voice of Change©
One of the most dreaded tasks of every manager is the annual performance review. It’s a time when they have to burn the midnight oil to scan through personnel files, reports and hand-scribbled notes to compile some semblance of an employee’s past six or 12 months work. Managers hate preparing them and employees dread hearing them.
Performance reviews in the past have not been used effectively. They can be great times to evaluate the positives, the negatives, and fine-tune for the future. Properly executed, performance reviews can be one of the best improvement and motivating tools a manager has.
Preparation is the key to successful performance evaluations. Rather than choose a multitude of negative comments and only one or two positive, praise-worthy remarks, find ways for the employee to do a brief self-assessment before starting the review. They often will mention accomplishments that were important to them but minimized in a manager’s report.
Here some tips to make performance reviews more effective:
1. Set Expectations Performance reviews are excellent times to create a list expectations – from the manager’s perspective as well as the employee – for the coming year. Set short-term, 30-day goals to achieve these expectations over a six or 12 month period. These expectations and goals must be written and reviewed periodically to maintain focus.
2. Positive Language Keep the conversation positive. Employees dread performance reviews because it’s usually a time when their shortcomings are placed in the spotlight. Negative feedback is more acceptable when packaged as a discussion on lessons learned from the mistake or as a goal-setting exercise to avoid the same pitfall again.
3. Retitle the Review Rather than continue calling them performance reviews, how about using Performance Improvement sessions? Let the employee decide areas they want to improve over the coming months – skills they want to learn and tasks they want to do. That creates “ownership” of the improvement plan.
