The Importance of Employee Performance Reviews

To know if your organization is growing in a healthy and productive way, it’s important to evaluate all areas of your business. This means not only measuring success by reviewing your Profit and Loss (P&L) statement, but by taking the time to gauge how your employees are thriving within the company. Performance reviews are not always easy to conduct, and at times, can require a hard conversation, but they are essential for any business that wants to succeed. Annual reviews also allow for one-on-one time with employees and a break from the office’s day-to-day hustle to refocus your team.

We’re sharing a host of tips and guidelines so you can be armed and equipped for employee review success this year.

How to Measure
For production-oriented work environments (such as a sales position), evaluations may require quantitative measurements. Other organizations may find it more effective to provide employees with qualitative metrics. Regardless, the purpose of creating a review process is to determine if an employee is a good fit for an organization by evaluating their goals and skill set, and also to ensure they’re thriving and set up for growth and success.

Consistency and Timing
However your organization decides to execute employee evaluations, consistency is important so your employees trust the process. If your organization works on a fiscal calendar year of January through December, you may find the best time to schedule reviews is at the end of the fourth quarter. On the other hand, if your organization is a non-profit and year-end is June 30th, the second quarter may work best for evaluations. Alternatively, you may decide to have reviews completed at the time of an employee’s start-date anniversary. What’s most important is consistency!

Two-Way Feedback
Reviews are meant to provide the time and space for feedback, shedding light on both areas of success for an employee and areas to be improved upon. At the same time, employees may also express their own concerns. Taking employee/manager feedback seriously serves as a tool to help strengthen the relationships of your team as they know their voice will be heard, and they understand expectations.

Goal Setting
It’s important that evaluations have the same standards among all employees. This is an opportunity to reset expectations on what you feel your employees should accomplish in their role within the company. By setting goals, you can also acknowledge any performance issues that employees may have and give them the space to develop a plan for improvement.

Give Praise
Creating one-on-one time with an employee gives you the chance to praise them as their supervisor. If you hire great people, you will want to retain them. Recognizing and rewarding their hard work is one of the most effective ways of keeping them as part of your team. These positive contributions to the company may result in monetary rewards that impact the employee’s salary as a form of a bonus or a wage increase (hello end-of-year bonus!).

Training and Development
Once evaluations are complete, make sure to continue the conversation and provide ways for employees to stay engaged with personal development. During the individual employee sessions, you may find that your employees need additional help after you assess their strengths and weakness. Providing additional training opportunities will undoubtedly strengthen company culture.

Employee Rights
There are times when an employee doesn’t agree with their evaluation. To ensure that they have the ability to appeal, it is recommended that you have an appeal process in place with your Human Resource manager and their direct manager. If your company has forced rankings within their evaluation process, you may want to let staff know in advance that not everyone will receive an “exceeded expectation” during review time.

Providing Feedback
With any company, it is necessary to evaluate your employees on an annual basis to aid personal development and keep work performance in check. The review process allows you to assess employees’ skills, establish new goals, and provide specific feedback. Remember, this is not a time to give outdated feedback for issues that occurred months ago. Rather, this meeting is an opportunity to talk about big-picture ideas.

Reviews Are Crucial
If you think skipping the step of conducting employee annual reviews won’t affect your workplace, think again. While performance reviews are not always a fun process, they can be extremely beneficial if you approach them correctly. Achievement-oriented employees need and want feedback in order to excel. Plus, everyone who is employed with your company should know where they stand in terms of meeting company expectations.

Employees like having the opportunity to speak to their managers one-on-one about their personal goals and future growth plans that will help them excel within their career and advance the organization. Treat each meeting with care as you review the employee’s past goals, performance feedback, and set new goals with clear, measurable benchmarks. Overall, employees do want to do a great job for their employer. Your goal is to make your employees feel valued, produce better work and perform smarter while in the office.

Need help in getting this process started? That’s what we’re here for!

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