Graphic Media Alliance

01/23/2024

Conducting Employee Reviews

Source: Fisher Phillips, January 5, 2024

If your workplace is anything like most others, your team probably dreads the annual performance review process. Employees don’t like receiving reviews and managers don’t like conducting them. In fact, only 26% of North American organizations thought they were effective at both managing and paying for performance, according to a recent Willis Towers Watson survey. What does this mean for your organization? Poor performance management can hurt your operations and have significant legal consequences, yet employers often make the same fundamental mistakes year after year. Want to keep conducting ineffective – and potentially disastrous – performance evaluations? Keep following these five steps below. But if you want to improve the process this year and add value for your workforce, we also provided some practical tips on developing an effective performance management system.

Step One: Don’t Prepare

The best way to conduct a really bad evaluation is to just wing it. Too many employers consider performance management a one-time meeting at the end of the fiscal year. Perhaps the manager and employee share a cup of coffee (either in person or virtually) and discuss the past year in very general terms. Effective performance management requires goal setting, on-going monitoring, and year-end feedback with tangible examples of successes and improvement opportunities. The process should be transparent to employees and consistent from year to year. 

Practical Tips:

• Develop an annual timeline with designated periods for goal setting, mid-year check-ins, and year-end evaluations.
• Train your managers on the importance of effective performance management to make it a priority rather than a bureaucratic task.

Step Two: Skip the Goal Setting Process

Why set goals when you have no idea what the next year will bring? Because this is quite possibly the most important aspect of performance management. Setting effective goals designed for the individual employee at the start of the performance period is essential for success. Unfortunately, many managers simply copy the previous year’s goals, or they don’t create specific objectives at all. In some cases, all employees have identical cookie-cutter goals that don’t provide a meaningful strategy for optimal performance. Goals should be relevant to the overall business objectives and result in meaningful development for the employee. The goals should be collaboratively developed and SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound.

Practical Tips:

• Develop unique goals at the start of the planning year.
• Tie goals to either the company’s objectives or the employee’s career development objectives (or both).
• Train managers on how to set appropriate goals.

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