Meaningful Performance Appraisals
What gives an organisation reason to develop an inclusive evaluation process?
A performance review is a mutual, tailored conversation between leaders and employees about performance impact, development, and growth. It is a critical component of an organisation’s leadership strategy.
Traditionally, performance reviews have occurred annually and focused on evaluating past performance but is this the best method. To evaluate performance within your organisation and discover what your employees need to grow, you need a proven process.
What’s it good for?
A performance evaluation is one of the puzzle pieces of a leadership program and as performance strategies have evolved, so have the modern performance review goals.
Such reviews are a foundational way to leverage talent, understand needs and opportunities, and gather intelligence for making connections with employees and more comprehensive organisational strategies. They’re a direct path to empowering employees by helping them reach their fullest potential.
What are the risks and hurdles?
When performed correctly, they can engage and motivate employees to maximise and align their efforts. Done wrong, they can send employees down a disengagement spiral and even decrease performance.
Performance reviews are arguably one of the most uncomfortable elements of being an employee, and a leader can find them difficult to navigate.
For employees, annual performance reviews are almost always uncharted territory:
- Speaking with a leader, they may not have interacted with in some time
- Recalling goals they set months ago
- Defending mistakes they can’t fix
- Bringing up pay in a way that isn’t considered rude
For leaders, it can be equally unnerving:
- Summarising a whole year of employment with a single review
- Revisiting goals an employee may not have looked at in months and holding them accountable
- Recalling teachable moments throughout the year
- Figuring out how to discuss (or perhaps avoid discussing) pay.
And yet, for all the effort organisations put into the review process, the traditional approach doesn’t appear to be paying off. Employees might rarely agree that the performance reviews inspire them to improve.
With this in mind, many notable organisations have decided to reimagine their performance review playbooks and think about their performance leadership systems differently.
The next step
As performance management evolves, questions can arise. Should there even be formal evaluations, or should they be more informal? Should there be ratings or no ratings? Do reviews need to be more straightforward, or are they vague? Do we need to gather more data or allow subjective input?
These debates often diverge from the fundamental question: “How can we hold people accountable for their performance in a more accurate, helpful and inspiring manner?”