Another Dreaded Performance Review

Your palms are sweaty. You are typing madly on your keyboard noting the clock is ticking down to your meeting. You are flipping through notes trying to decipher your chicken scratchings, your memory of what happened six months ago is fuzzy, and last year seems like a different job. Goals you set together are meaningless because somewhere along the way, the goal posts moved. You barely know what is expected of you let alone your team of five and a couple of them switched jobs half way through, but you can't remember why.

If you feel the performance review is a torture device foisted upon you by the Evil HR Director that would make Catbert look like a kitten, you are not alone. Your employees feel the same way.
Trying to sum up an entire year of blood, sweat and tears into a few tawdry pages of ratings or rankings doesn't really fit what they do anyway. Worst of all, those rankings and ratings will establish who gets a raise and whether or not your employee will be perceived as being a team player on the fast track. Have you ever heard anyone say, 'Hooray, I get a performance review?"

I confess. I hate the typical performance review. I bet you do too.
Those people who don't get nightmares the night before are usually too naive to know better. Even the notoriously pro-feedback Gen Y'ers swiftly realize that typical performance reviews are not what they imagined and duck and cover at that time of the year.
There is a better way, but before we go there, it is important to figure out why we even have performance reviews. Performance reviews are needed:

• For documentation of performance in case you need it (i.e. when the employment relationship goes horribly awry);
• To provide feedback to the employee;
• To serve as a basis for decisions on raises.

You should know I am not particularly interested in forcing employees to improve their weaknesses. It is far simpler, faster and more pleasurable for all involved to develop a talent or encourage a work-around strength than to beat your head against a weakness.

Competent performance begins with the employee who has the skills, talents, experience, fit, and desire to meet the job's expectations. It is the hiring manager's role to assess prospects and select the candidate that ideally exceeds, but at least meets, the minimum requirements and is highly motivated.

Unfortunately, many poor performers are in the wrong job or the wrong environment and, if you hire someone to answer phones who hates talking on the telephone or other similar misfits between the employee' talents and the job, your challenge is with staffing and selection systems, not the performance review.
The performance review can be an opportunity to help your employees (and your business) be successful, not by being Pollyanna and only focusing on the positive, but by being proactive, constructive, and focused on how to achieve your goals together.

Performance reviews should be multifaceted and distribute attentions between the past, present and future.
Past

• Recognize and appreciate efforts and strengths which contributed to successes to date (not just what but how)
• Acknowledge learning experiences and areas of opportunity

Present

• Build the relationship between employee and manager
• Refocus the employee on the task at hand
• Clarify what is expected from the manager and the employee

Future

• Recalibrate goals to ensure they are S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic & time sensitive)
• Reveal potential obstacles and collaborate on how to overcome or avoid them
• Plan for future growth & development experiences for the employee

There are many different formats to address these points, but I created a template to act as a conversation guide and either I summarize or I ask my employee to summarize our meeting in an e-mail that we both refer to next time.
Keep ratings simple if you use them at all. Few of us are insightful enough to discern between a 6 or 7 on a scale of 1-10. On a 1-5 rating scale, the most common responses are 3 or 4.
All the ratings and weightings, in the end, still only describe the following three categories:

• Meeting expectations;
• Exceeding them, or;
• Needing to improve.

That is why I like to keep ratings simple and use only those three categories from the start. Normally, 80-85% of your people typically meet expectations, which means they meet them most of the time and occasionally exceed. The next 10-15% typically exceed expectations and it is clear to everyone, including their peers, that they are exceptional. The last 5% are not meeting expectations, most of whom are learning their jobs.

People who chronically don't meet expectations should be on their way out.
Spend more time meeting with and helping the "meets" and "exceeds" people than the experienced and intentionally "not meeting expectations" employees. Attention from and time spent with a manager are valued by employees. Reward those who deserve it.
Final notes about performance reviews:

• If you do them regularly, these meetings can be short and sweet (<30 mins);
• Train your managers in how to effectively hold this kind of performance review & preview (of the future) meeting;
• Teach your employees what a good performance meeting feels like;
• Don't save your feedback for the performance meeting. If you see something great, congratulate them immediately, and if you see problem behaviours, deal with them immediately.
• Ensure your managers and employees have the tools, resources, support and abilities to achieve goals set out for them. Success and achievement are powerful motivators.
• Track what you agreed to so you have something to work from next time.

To those of you who are concerned with how to get started, the goals for each job and/or a clear purpose for and understanding of why the job exists are the foundation. From there, it should be pretty clear whether the employee is meeting or exceeding what is expected for them on the job.
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then why do we keep doing performance reviews the same way?

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