Why Your Performance Reviews Aren’t Working

Hardly anybody looks forward to a performance review—and this applies to both employees and managers alike.

Performance reviews typically take place every year or every six months. The manager writes out a report about the employee’s good points and shortcomings and sits down with the employee for a one-on-one.

Scoresheets with hard ratings may be involved, as well as self-evaluations. The purpose of a performance review is to enlighten the employee about how he’s doing, and hopefully nudge him towards improvement.

It sounds great—except that performance reviews rarely live up to their promise and tend to reek more of compliance than genuine coaching.

The downside of performance reviews

For one, managers find performance reviews unpleasant. Aside from having to cite hard evidence for every point that they raise, they have to play along with the role that a performance review automatically assigns them—that of a higher authority passing down judgment.

This lends a defensive air to the entire meeting. Employees might feel attacked by helpful criticism, and managers might get evasive and avoidant, choosing to state only the positive.

An overwhelming 95% of employees don’t see performance reviews as helpful. In fact, research says that they “produce an extremely low percentage of top performers.”

Opt for regular feedback

Instead of conducting only a performance review—with all the hefty paperwork—you can opt to give regular feedback instead—say, once a month instead of every year. For employees to stay motivated with their work, they need to have some way to assess how they’re doing.

The more immediate the feedback, the better. If you only put in your observations on their performance once a year, it ceases to be relevant. Employees want to take action now, and they’d rather focus on the most pressing issues.

With that said, you need to be specific. Instead of saying that someone has no sense of urgency, point out a situation where they exemplified this, and give concrete advice for how they can improve.

Foster psychological safety

Aside from the frequency, the main difference between a performance review and optimized feedback is psychological safety. A performance review lacks psychological safety, in that it makes employees ill at ease.

Feedback is more of a two-way discussion, where the manager adopts a friendly, conversational tone and hones in on behavior that can be changed rather than throwing accusations at the other person. There’s a difference between saying “You’re a disorganized person” and “You usually miss deadlines, and we’d like to work on that”—the second one is more constructive and non-judgmental.

Such a setting allows the employee to speak up, too, and to state her opinion, to give a context for her actions. By putting both manager and employee on equal ground as conversational partners, camaraderie is established, and employees become more receptive to advice.

Conclusion

Organizational structure is shifting. Traditionally, managers and employees lie on a strict vertical hierarchy, with a utilitarian relationship: managers make the top-level decisions, and employees follow without questioning.

Now, though, work is evolving to be more humane and less bureaucratic. Companies are factoring in employee experience, acknowledging that individual happiness affects productivity.

More than labor that produces money for survival, work is being rebranded into the pursuit of purpose, and part of this approach is training managers to be concerned about the growth—rather than merely the performance—of their employees.

Performance reviews might still be useful for capturing the big picture, but if you’re aiming for raw improvement, then regular feedback is the way to go.

The post Why Your Performance Reviews Aren’t Working appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/5184/