Assessing employee strengths and weaknesses, then doing your best to shore up and reward strengths while minimizing weaknesses, is a crucial part of maximizing performance across your team. Employee performance reviews can be a golden opportunity to do this, but many leaders may struggle to make the most out of these sessions with their team members—especially if they don’t have a set employee performance review template or process to draw from.
What makes performance reviews so difficult for both employees and managers? What can you do to make your review sessions with employees more impactful? Read on for some information and advice—as well as a simplified employee performance review template to help you get started!
It’s rare for anyone’s favorite combination of words to be “it’s time for a performance review” regardless of whether it’s the person being assessed or the one doing the assessment. In fact, PayScale reports that “95 percent of managers are dissatisfied with the way their companies conduct performance reviews.” It’s expected that employees might not like performance reviews, but for managers to dislike them may surprise some.
Why is that? A few reasons for not liking performance reviews that we’ve seen brought up include:
These are just a few of the reasons that both managers and employees might hate performance reviews. However, knowing how to conduct a performance review can help make the experience more positive and effective for all parties involved.
Performance improvement is crucial for ensuring that organizations can consistently meet goals. However, consistently achieving improvement following performance reviews is often easier said than done.
One of the best ways to ensure consistency in any process is to create a formal document or template for that process. Performance reviews are no exception to this rule.
This is where using a performance review template can help. With a template, you have a standardized document to follow for each review that makes it easier to stick to best practices and give every employee a more consistent experience in their reviews. It can also help save a little time on review prep since you have that document at your fingertips from the beginning!
Here are a few tips for using a performance review template in your one-on-one sessions with employees:
When using a performance review template, it’s important to ensure that it fully addresses the kind of work your employees do and the goals your organization has for them. So, when creating (or adapting) a performance review template, it can help to customize the template with key performance indicators (KPIs) and content sections specific to each employee’s role.
When selecting KPIs, try to focus on ones that are objectively measurable. For example, a call center agent KPI might have an objective of successfully resolving 25 customer calls per shift. This is a clear-cut, easy-to-understand measurement of success.
This helps to avoid the problem of subjectivity in reviews—making them fairer and more consistent.
This might take a bit of extra prep work, especially if your team has numerous roles with different assessment criteria, but it will make for a more effective assessment in the long run.
Collecting feedback from employees can be an invaluable tool for learning information that isn’t always apparent in performance data. So, when creating or modifying a template document for performance reviews, it can help to leave a section for writing down employee feedback from the session.
Following up an employee performance review with post-assessment actions, whether they include performance improvement plans, training, or other corrective/educational actions is crucial for maximizing the impact of a review.
Adding a section in the template to account for post-review actions and whether they’ve been completed can be a good way to ensure that important follow-up procedures aren’t missed. It can also help to use an employee coaching tool or learning management system that can generate automated reminders and notices after the review.
How frequently do you plan to conduct reviews? Is this going to be a monthly, quarterly, or annual event for your team? There’s a strong correlation between review frequency and efficacy, so planning on more frequent reviews can have a positive impact on results.
However, if you plan on having more frequent reviews with employees, you may not need to go into as much detail with each one. Or, you may want to focus on different things at different reviews to keep these shorter reviews from becoming too rote.
If you’re holding reviews once a quarter, then you might want to track performance for goals specific to larger initiatives that were active during that quarter.
Starting a performance review with a positive can be a good way to help put an employee at ease and demonstrate that you appreciate their effort. So, putting a section detailing the employee’s strengths or major accomplishments at the top of your template can be a good idea.
Putting positive feedback at the start of your template helps to ensure that it won’t get missed if the performance review runs out of time—which helps ensure that you’ve communicated something for the employee to be proud of.
Here’s a simple story that highlights the difference having an employee review template can make:
Justin and Nicole are both managers in a call center specializing in outbound sales for XYZ, Inc. They oversee different sales teams that each have a battery of annual performance reviews coming up. Justin is a newer manager who isn’t as experienced in the role, so he’s not entirely sure what to do. Meanwhile, Nicole has a long-established process for performance reviews and has even assembled a simple template to help her prep for these reviews more quickly.
On the day of their reviews with employees, Justin struggles to get to the core issues blocking each employee from meeting goals, doesn’t do a great job of recognizing employee efforts, and keeps focusing on subjective assessment criteria instead of objective criteria. Following the assessments, performance doesn’t really change much—it doesn’t get better or worse since his employees keep plugging along as they always have been before he became their manager.
Meanwhile, Nicole uses her performance review template to stick to a set format and ensure she hits all of the best practices that she’s honed over years of conducting these reviews.
So, she starts each review by congratulating the employee with a personal milestone they’ve met and asks them for some feedback about what went well and what didn’t from their perspective. She also asks for suggestions about how to improve things so they can meet their goals more efficiently in the future.
After getting their subjective feedback, she then goes on to talk about the actual results generated—highlighting any areas where the employee did well or could have improved on. When addressing shortfalls in goals, Nicole highlights tools, training modules, and other resources that the employee can leverage to help them perform better. She even sets aside a few minutes to roleplay scenarios with each employee to help them practice their skills.
After the review, Nicole sets up a few automated reminders to check on employee progress towards goals and has quick follow-ups with a few employees who are still struggling. While not every employee sees drastic improvement, the majority of the team sees a noticeable increase in productivity and her department is able to make bonus next quarter.
Employee Name: ______________________ |
Review Date: __/__/____ |
Job Title: _____________________________ |
Review Period: __/__/___ to __/__/____ |
Employee Strengths: |
|
KPI #1 Goal: |
KPI #1 Results: |
KPI #2 Goal: |
KPI #2 Results: |
KPI #3 Goal: |
KPI #3 Results: |
Employee Feedback: |
|
Post-Review Action Items: 1. ____________________________________ [complete/incomplete] 2. ____________________________________ [complete/incomplete] 3. ____________________________________ [complete/incomplete] |
Need help getting together the data you need to make performance reviews more effective, make post-review follow-up simpler, and actively communicate with employees? Reach out to C2Perform to get started with a comprehensive employee productivity management platform!