Now is the Time to Focus on Performance Reviews
The best leaders don't wait until the last minute to prepare, you shouldn't either.
For companies who are on a January-December fiscal year, many managers have just completed mid-year reviews. Most are exhaling a sigh of relief over what often feels like a grueling process.
The time it takes to assess direct reports, highlight strengths and wins, critique misses, and identify growth areas can feel disruptive to day-to-day operations and never-ending, especially if you have a large team. And woe to the manager who did not provide under-performers critical feedback earlier before the review cycle even began.
But performance reviews don’t have to be so difficult. With a mindset shift and some simple changes, you can turn this process into a valuable touch point that is only minimally disruptive for you and your direct reports.
The best part? You can make this change at any time of the year — right before a review cycle starts, right after one ends, or in between cycles.
Now is always the best time to focus on performance reviews. Let’s dig in!
A Story
Grace had been a manager for 3 years and every year without fail, she dreaded and was completely deflated by the performance review process. It felt bureaucratic, not relevant, and extremely time-consuming. In an effort to innovate, the company made changes to its processes and systems almost every year. However, this meant a significant cognitive load on managers who had to learn a new method and sit through training every year.
In addition, there other issues brewing:
Employees questioned whether their managers were truly invested in their growth.
Leaders were complaining that performance standards had languished — too many managers were not addressing or exiting under-performers.
They were not going to achieve their goals nor retain top talent in this environment.
This year, they hired a new HR leader, Darryl, who came in with a different perspective. Instead of focusing on the formal review cycles, Darryl emphasized regular, timely feedback and created accountability systems to help managers and their employees track progress.
Darryl’s philosophy was simple:
Timely, direct feedback leads to greater trust, motivation, and productivity.
Great feedback includes wins + misses + learnings + growth opportunities.
Performance reviews are simply a summary of timely, direct feedback along with a discussion of career progression.
Before implementing a company-wide change, Darryl asked a few managers to road-test his recommendations. Grace gladly signed up.
Darryl’s Recommendations
Weekly 1:1 templates prepared by employees 1 day before their meetings and shared with their manager
In addition to other discussion topics, templates included the following which would be filled out only if there was something to share:
Wins - summary of outcomes achieved
Misses - summary of outcomes missed
Learnings - what they learned
Growth Areas - areas of opportunity going forward
Managers would review these ahead of their meetings and add additional comments.
Together they would use the 1:1 meeting to align on the assessment and any next steps.
An Accountability Buddy for every manager and every employee, respectively, who met with them to review their wins, misses, learnings, and growth areas for 15 min (7.5 min each person) every other week.
The goal wasn’t to discuss every item in detail. But more so to just make sure they were taking stock of these items.
If managers or employees had concerns about the assessments, they could meet with their HR partner as needed.
A twice a month submission from managers to HR of their top performers and under-performers
Managers needed to indicate if they had communicated their assessment to the employee and if they hadn’t, when they would.
Any employee who was listed for 4 weeks in the under-performer category would lead to a conversation with HR to discuss next steps to remedy or exit.
At first, Grace and other managers were concerned by the additional time required to complete the above tasks and the additional formal oversight from HR. Some managers outright rejected the approach, but others like Grace felt it was worth testing for at least a quarter to see if there was value. Almost all participating managers heard push back from their employees, but when they explained what they were trying to improve and that it was a test, most simmered down after a week or two.
The accountability buddy and the twice-a-month performer assessment submissions ended up being relatively light touch. What most managers and employees found most challenging was the weekly 1:1 template preparation. Employees and managers now had to be more thoughtful each week to truly assess their progress.
Like many new habits, while it took effort and time to initially learn, over time the assessment each week became easier and less time-consuming. Many 1:1s had increased from 45 min to 75 min in the first month as people were normalizing the new behaviors. By month three, most 1:1s were 60 min on days when there was more to discuss. When Darryl checked in to see how the test was going, managers recommended extending the test to have more time to gather learnings. At six months, Darryl surveyed the participating managers and employees.
Four main outcomes arose from the behavior changes:
Employees felt more clear about where they stood and felt more trust in their relationships with their manager.
Employees and managers were addressing issues in a more timely fashion, reducing the risks of miscommunication.
Employees felt more psychological safety because they no longer needed to wonder about how they were being assessed. Managers were sharing their assessments regularly.
Managers took appropriate action on underperforming employees more quickly.
Employees who were missing the mark, but had the skills and were motivated to grow made progress more quickly because there was less of a delay in hearing where they needed to improve.
Employees who were not a fit for their role had the option to apply to other roles in the company within a 30-day time frame, and after that, they were exited if they did not improve. This significantly improved team performance and morale.
Top performers accelerated their growth and felt supported.
Managers gave top performers feedback on how to grow even more and gave them more stretch assignments.
Top performers felt better recognized and more investment from their managers in their development.
Managers and employees reported that Performance Reviews took them less time and they found them less stressful and disruptive than in the past.
Employees and managers were able to scan their 1:1 documents for past wins, misses, learnings, and growth areas and quickly summarize these in preparation for their Performance Reviews.
Day-to-day operations took less of a hit during the Performance Review period because employees and managers felt less stressed and better prepared.
With these learnings, Darryl rolled out the new system across the company with the help of the managers and employees in the test group as ambassadors. There was more resistance from the wider staff, but over time, they too saw the benefits of more timely feedback and progress tracking on both performance and performance management.
A Learning (or two)
Sometimes the concerns that you hear from your team or that you experience yourself are solved by digging a bit deeper into the root cause. It would have been easy to change the Performance Review process again. But the root issue wasn’t the Performance Review process or system.
The root issue was that managers and employees weren’t regularly tracking and discussing their progress. This was not only making the Performance Review process more onerous, but also demotivating staff, fracturing trust, and not helping to build high-performing teams.
Darryl offered a highly prescriptive solution and created systems and processes for managers and employees to follow to create accountability and build the habit. This won’t work for every organization, but here are some universal concepts you can design to work for you and your team:
Take stock of performance more frequently — weekly or bi-weekly instead of monthly. .
Write it down. Don’t assume you’ll remember what you were thinking and why. Create a repository that you can easily access of emails, metrics, presentation recordings, and any other relevant evidence to support your assessment.
Share your assessment promptly. The only thing worse than a negative reaction from your direct report when you share your feedback is delaying your feedback. Give your employees a chance to address your concerns and make improvements by speaking with them directly and immediately.
Take Action
A great way to put some of these learnings into practice is to talk about them with your team. Having your team understand why you are prioritizing this area of work will create buy-in. Discuss why this matters to you and why it will help them. Get input on what they would like to see happen.
Propose a few changes to how you currently track performance. It can be as simple as sending yourself an email when you have an observation with some brief notes and links to relevant documents. It can also be incorporated into your 1:1s as Darryl recommended.
After a month or two, check in with your team to see how it’s going. Make adjustments, and keep going. The real proof of whether this is working will be in how well your team is performing and whether the performance review process feels less burdensome for managers and employees.
Your Turn
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the Comments section on:
What are some of the most effective ways you track and communicate feedback?
If there was one thing you could change about your current process, what would it be?
Let’s all strengthen performance management and make it a stronger practice for our organizations!
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The detail in this is so helpful. As a manager, it can be very difficult to do performance reviews that don't feel like personal criticism. As an employee, it is too easy to feel defensive. This thoughtful approach is needed, even in smaller companies. What do you think about weekly reports to help track performance?
Excellent and informative article Kathy!