No matter what trends come and go in the workforce, performance reviews will always be an essential way to keep your talent sharp and your team aligned. As vital as they are, though, the formal performance review carries with it a weight of notoriety and dread. Workers fear employee evaluation comments of undeserved reproach, and managers fear the discomfort of criticizing the team that they work to build a good relationship with.
As some of us have experienced, there are certainly less optimal strategies to employ during a performance review. You don’t want to be soft on an underachieving employee, but you can’t run them out of the room either. Focusing on chastising underachievement instead of encouraging overachievement is a recipe for stagnation among your team – this is the time to enable them to succeed going forward. Your mission isn’t as much performance “management” as it is performance “enablement”.
Performance enablement can keep productivity high, culture strong, and employee retention consistent. Carrying out performance reviews incorrectly, on the other hand, can actually do more harm than good – an APA study revealed that productivity actually lowers after performance reviews about ⅓ of the time.
There are countless ways to avoid that drop in productivity by keeping your performance review constructive while maintaining a friendly countenance, no matter who you’re talking with. An effective round of reviews can be the difference between high employee retention and high employee turnover. Here are some examples of ways to deliver a great performance review that leaves everyone satisfied:
GREAT PERFORMANCE REVIEW EXAMPLES
Don’t fall into the “pattern trap”
Naturally, when giving performance reviews to a team that works together and talks about their experiences, you’d want to remain consistent from person to person. However, that can lead to an all-too-common trap: the “compliment sandwich”.
This is a method of feedback where you begin the discussion with some praise, include constructive criticism in the middle, and end it on a high note with more compliments. In practice, this works for some employees very well; many people are reliable workers with few areas to improve in. The mistake is made when you get used to handing out compliment sandwiches and then apply the formula to everyone on your team.
If you have a couple of underperforming employees on your staff, you’ll end up reaching harder to find compliments and condensing your criticisms to the middle. Even if your criticisms were valid, they’ll likely leave under the impression that you see them as an average worker, and won’t make an effort to improve because they got a solid amount of praise.
At the same time, don’t be afraid to give your best performers a more glowing report. If you dig to find criticisms to complete the template, he or she could leave discouraged because their extra effort didn’t earn them a great review. You can, however, suggest ways to improve and take their success another level higher.
Dick Grote, author of How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals, notes, “Most people are good solid workers, so for the vast majority, you should concentrate exclusively on things the person has done well.”
Don’t skew your reviews to fit a pattern, but tailor them to reflect on exactly how well the person is doing. They’ll leave with a better picture of their aptitude as a worker and will be enabled to either fix it or keep it up.
Provide clear examples
We’ve all sat through vague performance review comments that leave us feeling even less clear about our progress than when we started the meeting. Your team members have plenty of specific memories about what worked and what didn’t over the last quarter/year, and they’ll be listening for what you have to say about them.
So, be specific! Remark upon ways they’ve improved, moments they’ve shown leadership qualities, and any other times they’ve demonstrated certain characteristics during meetings and projects. The ability to recall specific anecdotes both shows your team that you truly pay attention and helps them understand what they should continue and what they need to improve.
This is as good a time as any for us to remind you the most important rule of performance reviews: be honest. These reviews are meant for improvement, and nothing will improve without being addressed. No matter how big or small an employee’s issue is, it’s vital to be honest and suggest ways to fix it; when done with care, honesty in performance reviews will lead to dramatic changes as time goes on that result in higher productivity, stronger trust and more employee retention.
Stick to the numbers
A 2019 study by Princeton University found that the average person will assume someone is a more effective worker if they’re wearing nice clothes and have attended a prestigious university. Without knowing anything about their aptitude at their job, the first impression was convincing enough.
Sometimes as a manager, you can find yourself assessing your team on the surface without getting deeper into their actual performance. You may have some members of your team whose qualifications and overall persona have pigeonholed them in your head, whether for better or for worse.
Always go deeper. Perhaps their sales have been among the top of the branch, or they’ve been tapering off lately. If your business is less numbers-oriented, you can also reflect on their participation; have they been checked out or dialed in? Have they been knocking their goals out of the park or barely meeting expectations?
This not only gives you an accurate impression of how valuable they are as a team member, but it’s also evidence that’s much easier for them to accept during the one-on-one conversation, as they know you’ve made an effort to be free of bias. If you claim that they’ve been falling behind and you show them the evidence in the data, they’re likely to understand.
Don’t let someone’s professional demeanor convince you they’re smarter than a more laid-back employee – check on their work output first.
Get 360° feedback
You may find yourself giving a performance review to an employee who reports to multiple different supervisors, whether indirect managers, team leaders, or HR advisors. If you feel like you need a more holistic idea of this person’s productivity, it’s always a good idea to ask around and crowdsource feedback.
There’s a strategy for good 360° feedback. A team leader might tell you that this person missed a couple deadlines on a particular group assignment, and you might remember they also recently missed an important one for you. Now, you shouldn’t tell that employee, “So-and-so told me you were missing deadlines on that project.” This creates an air of mistrust, as the person now feels that their teammates are talking behind their back.
Instead, frame bad feedback you hear in a more general sense. They’re aware the criticism is true, but since it’s non-specific, they won’t get the impression that comments about them are circulating the office. Simply say something like, “You’ve been having trouble getting things in on time, and it shouldn’t continue. How can I help?”
If you ask around and their other teammates have good things to say about them, e.g., “I watched them put in a lot of extra effort to land three big clients in a week,” you can absolutely feel free to let them know you heard about it and commend them for it. They’ll leave feeling recognized and motivated to continue the extra effort, knowing you’ll probably hear about it.
Getting feedback from their peers is always a good idea, as long you know how to pass along the information.
Let them return you the feedback
When an employee’s receiving a face-to-face performance review, they feel like they’re on the spot and that the power dynamic is more skewed than usual. As a manager, you don’t want that to be the case, but it seems unavoidable.
However, if you let them know that they’ll have an opportunity to give you feedback yourself, they’ll feel more comfortable and receptive to what you have to say. Sarah Franklin, co-founder of Blue Tree AI, advises, “An effective performance evaluation includes the employee evaluating me as well. I want to hear from my team what strengths they feel I have and in what areas they need more attention from me.
In fact, returns from such feedback are quantifiable; a Gallup study found that managers who received feedback on their strengths showed 8.9% greater profitability after the review.
Now, you may have made some mistakes recently, or disgruntled a few employees, or simply felt that you didn’t complete many goals over the last year. This is okay – as long as you don’t believe their feedback will be overwhelmingly negative, it’s healthy to hear some mixed opinions. An important step to this is to make sure they don’t take the performance review as an opportunity to complain about you; instead, you could suggest the use of something like the “stop, start, continue” technique.
You may be wondering to yourself what your team’s opinion of you is in the first place. If you’re not sure, it might be a sign of a different issue – you’re not keyed into your staff’s circle. When a workforce finds that their manager is unapproachable or distant, it creates a host of problems that belong in a different discussion.
If you’re a great manager and you know it, this is the perfect method to make your performance reviews a less intimidating experience. If you’re worried your team might mutiny any day now, though, you may want to skip it and start working on your employee experience.
To learn more about performance reviews, check out our Library here! To see HelloTeam in action, click here — and to set up a meeting with us, go here!