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| Performance reviews give bosses and managers an opportunity to detail both the good and bad aspects of each employee. Credit: iofoto | Shutterstock |
Bosses and employees alike often see performance reviews as a necessary evil. Workers fear hearing their performance is inadequate, while managers struggle to find the best way to balance praise and criticism. But regardless of how a boss feels about putting his or her staff under a microscope, regular performance reviews are an important and constructive way to evaluate the contributions an employee is making to the company.
The goal of a performance evaluation is to give workers feedback on what they are doing right and what needs improvement. Frequent, informal conversations with employees help managers to ensure everyone is staying on task and to address quick, easy-to-solve issues. Formal reviews, on the other hand, can carry much more weight, and even determine an employee's future career path at the company, for better or for worse.
Whether you need a template for your formal, written evaluations or just need help starting a dialogue about performance with your employees, here are a few tips for bosses to make the review process easier and less stressful.
Writing an employee evaluation
Writtenreviews are an important component of performance evaluation, but many managers find it difficult to complete this task effectively. If positive comments aren't phrased well, they can sound trite and insincere, and any suggestions for improvement might sound too critical.
Richard Grote, author of "How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals" (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), said that instead of using terms such as "good" or "excellent" in a review, employers should opt for more measurement-oriented language. In an interview with HRCareers.com, Grote noted that action words are more meaningful — words such as "excels," "exhibits," "demonstrates," "grasps," "generates," "manages," "possesses," "communicates," "monitors," "directs" and "achieves."
Ken Lloyd, author of "Performance Appraisals & Phrases for Dummies" (For Dummies, 2009), offered a range of words and phrases managers could use for each type of employee responsibility, including:
- Quality and quantity of work: accuracy, thoroughness, productivity and goal attainment
- Communication and interpersonal skills: teamwork, cooperation, listening, persuasion and empathy
- Planning, administration and organization: goal setting, prioritizing and profit orientation
- Leadership: accessibility, responsiveness, decisiveness, collaboration and delegating
- Job knowledge and expertise: knowledge base, training, mentoring, modeling and researching
- Attitude: dedication, loyalty, reliability, flexibility, initiative, energy and volunteering
- Ethics: diversity, sustainability, honesty, integrity, fairness and professionalism
- Creative thinking: innovation, receptiveness, problem solving and originality
- Self-development and growth: learning, education, advancement, skill building and career planning
Conducting a formal performance review meeting
Many face-to-face performance reviews involve talking through an employee's written evaluation, but the meeting shouldn't be a perfunctory reading of this document to your staff member. It's important to give your workers the chance to share their own thoughts about their job performance.
"During a review, employers should allow the employee to do most of the talking since he or she rarely gets this opportunity," said Ted Karkus, CEO of Cold-EEZE manufacturer Prophase Labs. "Employers should ask employees to ask any questions they might have, what some of the high and low points were in their experience thus far, and what they would like to see changed in their position moving forward."
Brigette McInnis Day, executive vice president of human resources at enterprise software provider SAP, noted that employees should be allowed talk first during the review meeting.
"Give [employees] the chance to go first, and listen to them," McInnis Day told Business News Daily. "Don't talk at them. Start out with a question [such as], 'How do you think you've done this year?' to better know where their head is [and] know where the discussion is going to go."
Karkus said that employers should establish trust with employees by being honest and detailing goals and expectations for the coming period before the next review.
"The review should end with an offer for an open-door policy so the employee knows he or she can reach out with constructive concerns and issues right away," Karkus said.
Initiating informal performance reviews
A formal, documented annual or semi-annual review is important and necessary from a human resources standpoint, but these reviews shouldn't be the only feedback your employees receive throughout the year. As a manager, you should check in with your staff regularly to have casual conversations about general performance and current progress.
"Yearly performance reviews are stressful and unproductive," said Elizabeth Hall, vice president of people at project management solution Trello. "Bosses, team leads, managers, HR and anyone in a leadership role should be giving constant feedback. An employee should know how she or he is doing at all times. New employees benefit from a bit more structure, such as 30-, 60- and 90-day reviews, but those should be in conjunction to the constant feedback they hear."
"Regular performance reviews within my weekly check-in meetings make the process of improving more iterative, easier and less stressful than a 'quarterly review' that looms in the background and causes stress for both me and the employee," added David Greenberg, CEO and founder of Updater, a company that helps individuals easily update contact information with service providers when they move.
When giving informal feedback, McInnis Day recommended avoiding general comments, such as "nice work" or "good job," and instead citing specific examples, like "Great job leading that meeting," so the employee knows exactly what behaviors to repeat or change in the future.
Creating performance improvement plans
Employees whose performance is deemed subpar during an evaluation are often given a performance improvement plan, which is designed to boost an employee's performance by setting clear expectations and goals for the future. It gives an employee the opportunity to make changes before more drastic steps, such as being suspended or fired, are taken.
An article by the University of Texas at Dallas said that an effective performance improvement plan should identify the behavior to be corrected, provide clear expectations and metrics about the work to be performed or behavior that must change, identify the support and resources available to help the employee make the required improvements, and specify possible consequences if performance standards as identified in the plan are not met.
Performance review samples and templates
Examples and templates of performance evaluations can be found on the following websites:
- Business Balls
- Drexel University
- Entrepreneur.com
- Employee Performance Solutions
- Microsoft
Additional reporting by Chad Brooks, Business News Daily senior writer.
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