Making the most of employee performance reviews can be challenging. Many companies do not have an effective process to provide constructive feedback in a structured manner to improve employee performance.
The purpose of performance reviews is to create an accurate, actionable evaluation of an employee’s performance and develop their skills in line with their job duties and responsibilities. The goal is to identify areas in which employees can improve, practice their skills, and develop into high performers.
Fortunately, you can follow these best practices to help streamline the process of planning and conducting employee performance reviews. Following these recommendations provides structure to have these important conversations.
Follow these steps to make the most of employee performance reviews.
Clarify the Employee Performance Standards
Let employees know well in advance the standards and expectations for their performance reviews. Then, they can understand what they working toward and can perform accordingly.
Clarifying which employee activities are most important helps show the impact of on-the-job behaviors. Demonstrating the causal relationships helps show which behaviors led to positive outcomes and which behaviors led to bad outcomes. Then, employees can focus on the relevant behaviors to reach the desired outcomes.
Describe Specific Observations of Employee Performance
Share specific, descriptive feedback about the employee’s strengths and weaknesses and concrete suggestions to improve their performance. Include examples of behaviors that led to positive outcomes during the review period.
Support Open Discussion About the Employee’s Performance
Encourage the employee to respond to your feedback. They can provide additional insight into why they behaved a certain way or how they can improve in specific areas.
Perhaps the employee requires training and coaching to develop certain skills and improve their performance. Or, the employee might need additional incentives to increase motivation.
Develop an Employee Performance Improvement Plan
Discuss specific steps the employee can take to improve their performance. Include relevant resources, deadlines for improvement, and measurements of success. Then, schedule a time to follow up.
Follow Up on the Employee Performance Improvement Plan
Meet with the employee at the scheduled time to review their performance improvement plan. Evaluate whether the employee reached their key performance indicators (KPIs) for successful change.
If the employee reached their KPIs, discuss the improved performance and provide a relevant reward. Conversely, if the employee did not reach their KPIs, talk about the behaviors you observed and how they impacted performance. Uncover the causes of the underlying issues and how you can help resolve them. Create another performance improvement plan with a timeline to follow up.
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