Let’s face it: Everyone, employees and managers, dreads performance reviews. The tired ritual of sitting down for an hour once a year is uncomfortable and unproductive. No wonder companies like General Electric and Adobe are redefining how they approach feedback.
So, what exactly is going wrong? A TINYpulse survey of employees and managers found that performance reviews are simply too time-consuming. To combat this, managers tend to focus only on what’s happened recently, rather than taking a holistic look at performance.
Their feedback then looks at past missteps instead of coaching employees on how to improve in the future. Other problems persist, from a lack of follow-up on criticism to a perception of manager bias.
Improving performance reviews is critical for maintaining a healthy organizational culture. Refocusing the process on praising good work and identifying specific, measurable areas for improvement is essential for growth. Here are five tips on how to transform your performance review system.
1. Make them more frequent.
The single biggest problem with performance reviews is that they typically occur once a year, thereby attempting to tackle too much at one time. This encourages managers to focus on recent performance instead of evaluating what happened during the entire year. Eleven months of excellent work can be seemingly erased with a single off month.
This might be why Globoforce found that 51 percent of employees surveyed said they believed performance reviews are inaccurate.
The lack of frequency also makes the process more stressful. It feels like a formal event designed to illuminate the employee’s every flaw. Instead, more, regular reviews can incorporate feedback into everyday activity. Consider moving to a system with short, focused reviews occurring at least weekly. They’ll also allow managers to evaluate recent events that are fresh in their memory.
2. Strive to be objective.
According to our research, 10 percent of employees and 17 percent of managers surveyed believe that manager bias is the most significant problem with performance reviews. So, structure performance reviews around specific, measurable metrics. The more you can tie a review to…