Efficient and effective performance appraisals are core managerial skills. It’s an opportunity to reflect on an employee’s growth and their contribution to your business.
Key points
- Performance appraisals are sometimes called performance reviews, performance evaluations or one-on-ones
- It’s a chance to set goals and targets, find feedback from peers, log achievements and tackle weaknesses
- Performance reviews and appraisals can be held annually or more frequently
What is a performance review?
Performance reviews, sometimes called performance appraisals, are an opportunity for line managers or team leaders to review and recognise the achievements of their staff.
All performance appraisals are slightly different because they’re unique to the employee, but the topics you discuss are relatively consistent between sectors and workplaces:
- Measurements of success
- Troubleshooting shortcomings and weaknesses
- Identifying training gaps and updating their personal development plan (PDP)
- Peer feedback (good and bad)
- Fulfilment of objectives and key results (OKR)
- Embodiment of values
- Goal setting
- Contribution to team and business objectives
Sometimes an organisation will simultaneously review PDPs and OKRs in a performance review, so you have a blend of skills-based and data-based evidence to consider.
Over the last 30 years, the performance appraisal has been a tool used by HR and management to find a consistent way to hold and record reviews, while collating evidence to inform an organisation’s training needs analysis.
How often should you host performance appraisals?
Performance reviews and appraisals are traditionally conducted once a year, but successful managers employ a more frequent appraisal model.
You might have ad-hoc performance reviews when:
- There’s an opportunity to progress into a new role
- They’re covering a senior role (acting up)
- They want to negotiate their salary
- They aren’t performing as expected
In any case, performance reviews are always scheduled. With advanced notice and a planned agenda, your employee can prepare evidence and notes, even rehearse what they want to say to you, ensuring a meaningful conversation.
What effect will regular appraisals have?
By discussing performance on a day-to-day basis, your people realise that performance isn’t a box-ticking exercise to please HR (or a hoop they have to leap through just once a year).
Inform them of the business’s expectations for every task and project, and then relate these to their personal PDP and OKR. You’ll soon have a goal-oriented team.
Your people will gain self-awareness; their actions and contributions directly relate to the success of their team and the business.
How to prepare for a performance review
A successful appraisal relies on your managerial communication skills.
Inform your team about what you will cover (and the necessary information they should bring with them) well in advance of the review. You can both come to the table prepared with notes and questions, ready to listen and learn.
There are roughly 11 steps you can take ahead of performance reviews to be completely prepared. Here’s a template for managing an inspiring performance appraisal.
Write a detailed performance appraisal invite
The first written notice your employee will have about their review is likely to arrive via email. Tell them face-to-face when to expect the invite – it will make them feel seen and valued.
Book the review at least a week ahead to give them plenty of time to prepare.
Within the email, specify what to bring and include a rough agenda. There should be no surprises in a performance review – both parties need to feel comfortable and relaxed if you’re going to achieve anything.
Prompt them to self-reflect, ask questions, and provide evidence of successes. Your invite might look something like this:
Example Performance Appraisal Invite
Dear John,
As discussed, I’m booking some time for your one-on-one performance review.
We will talk about your personal development plan (PDP), achievements, and review some peer feedback from around the business. Attached is your PDP and objective key results (OKR) planning document from our last meeting. Could you please write a self-evaluation based on how you think you’ve fulfilled these targets? It would be really helpful for me if you could note any support and training you might need in the future as well.
Please bring project outcomes, examples of success, and any other supporting evidence you would like to share with me. We’ll look through it together and reposition your goals for the year ahead.
This is an excellent opportunity to ask questions, so please bring them along as well.
Thanks,
Joe
A detailed invite prompts your employee to gather their thoughts, and you must do the same. Collect data on your employees’ performance and its impact on the business.
That broader context enables you to unite their perspective with business outcomes, ultimately leading to an efficient, transparent, and insightful conversation.
Familiarise yourself with their job description
Before entering a performance review, take a moment to review the person’s job description. It helps you to get some empathy and see the company and role through their eyes.
- What do they think their responsibilities are?
- Does the day-to-day work reflect the job description?
- Are they completing work beyond the job description?
- Does their point of view correspond with your own?
If there’s a discrepancy between what they’re actually doing and the job description, it’s worth noting, but it’s not necessarily an issue.
Job descriptions are what HR thinks the business needs, but they don’t always translate practically. Keep it as contextual information – if your employee seems dissatisfied, a flawed job description could be the cause. Reading the job description will help you fully understand their motivation and mindset.
Match their qualities with company values
Contact HR and ask for guidance on how company values are expected to be reflected in employee qualities.
Sometimes, value benchmarks can be hard to define, so take the extra step and pin down achievable actions to help them embody the company’s voice.
Get their projects fresh in your mind
Show them you care. Their projects are on your radar, and you want to know how they’re going. Ask them to:
- Remind you of the purpose of the work
- What they expected the returns to be
- Whether it’s on track
- What have they learned so far?
- What could be done better?
Remind yourself of their last PDP
Whether you met a month ago or a year ago, it’s a good idea to read over the PDP and decide whether training has increased their productivity, or if little has changed.
You could also write notes about how you’ve seen them change and if you believe the learning has transferred and made a difference.
The PDP helps them to establish their existing skills and develop the skills they need. If you have some criticisms, it’s not a reflection on them; it’s just an experience or knowledge gap you can help them to bridge.
Be prepared to share an example of when you thought they performed well thanks to the training, or where they could have added more value and the appropriate training to help them in future.
Ask their peers for feedback
Collect impartial feedback about your employee from colleagues and other stakeholders within the business. It doesn’t need to be someone in their immediate team, but if they’re working cross-department on a project, they need to get a broad spectrum of feedback to aid their development and progression. You could ask:
Please give an example of when you worked well together.
What could be improved?
The feedback could be anonymous, but making it personal provides a meaningful and lasting impression.
Review their OKRs and targets
Your employee’s granular personal targets will be driven by the overarching aims of the business.
When you’re creating new OKRs, you must always use business objectives as a reference, so that your employee is working in towards a shared goal and not fighting upstream – it just sets them up to fail and could ruffle the feathers of their peers.
When reviewing whether they met previous OKRs, scrutinise the data and pull out some contextual key points.
For example, although the business might not meet its objective, your employee may have surpassed what was expected of them and that deserves to be acknowledged.
Apply SMART goals
SMART goals are specific, measurable, relevant and time-bound objectives. It’s a clear and thorough method of relaying targets to your employees – they set expectations for performance and can also be used as a motivational tool.
Work in time for special achievements
Every employee has a sink-or-swim moment, where they’re forced out of their comfort zone or forced to help out in a crisis. Take the time to acknowledge these moments so they feel appreciated.
Plan what you’re going to say
Now that you have all the data and surface-level insights, you need to plan what you will say. This task is two-fold: you need an agenda, but you also need to consider probing questions to ask at key moments.
You can use active listening to gather meaning behind your employee’s output and actions, but this is a chance for you to speak as well as listen.
By preparing your questions, you’ll prompt your employee to reflect on the correct information, so they clearly see what actions they can take and how to improve.
It will help them understand how they perceive their performance within a broader context.
Three questions to ask in a performance review
Your questions should be relevant to their current role or the role they’re seeking to advance to.
You need to measure them against the outcomes that the role should generate and be unique to the individual.
Just three simple questions will encourage a quality dialogue that needn’t stop in the review meeting.
The first question drives clarity:
#1 How well do you understand the job?
This might be their job as a whole or a task. Although you’ve re-read their job description, that’s not the answer you’re looking for. Their answer should reflect what the leader or manager expects from that particular individual.
Once you’re on the same page, you can proceed to question two:
#2 How good at it are you?
This will either be an open discussion about known limitations or weaknesses or an opportunity to share some candid feedback and evidence. Now we have a gap to bridge between the manager’s expectations and what’s actually happening.
Time for the third question:
#3 What help do you need?
This question explores alternatives for development or support.
If every manager throughout an organisation asks these three questions of their teams, both performance and communication will open up.
It can be applied daily and used for individual tasks or projects, as well as the job as a whole.
Encourage your employees to write self-appraisals
Writing a self-evaluation is a reflective tool that helps boost confidence and identify areas for training improvement. When an employee acknowledges their strengths and weaknesses and communicates them to you during the appraisal, it gives you a greater chance to support them.
The result? When a project arises which corresponds to their skills and qualities, you can step back and watch them thrive.
If the situation demands skills they don’t have or lack confidence in, you’re fully aware of their private frustrations and can step up with training and mechanisms to allow them to succeed.
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