I Just Completed My Employee Performance Reviews — Now What?
Performance review season can be a stressful and anxiety-inducing experience for everyone involved.
First, managers spend countless hours analyzing and documenting team members’ strengths and opportunities, but the real challenge comes when it’s time to deliver those assessments. Performance review meetings can be excruciatingly uncomfortable, no matter how often you’ve been through the process.
And, worse, they may not even yield results.
According to Adobe, 60% of employees feel performance reviews have no impact on how they do their jobs, and half of executives in a McKinsey survey also said current evaluation and feedback systems have no impact on performance.
Fortunately, you can change these outcomes. Today, we’re covering a step-by-step process for delivering employee performance reviews effectively and setting development goals that drive meaningful results.
4 Steps to Follow After Completing Employee Performance Reviews
After you’ve compiled your employee assessments, there are four steps you can take to make sure they have a positive impact and foster employee growth.
Step 1: Discuss the performance review with the employee
Many leaders opt for the sandwich method: start with the positive, delve into the criticisms, and then finish with a few compliments. But, while this strategy aims to ensure employees stay motivated, it can give mixed messages.
Instead, it’s best to be straightforward. When discussing areas where an employee is underperforming, be constructive and compassionate in your delivery—but don’t undermine the issue's importance just because it's uncomfortable. If any employee is performing above expectations, the conversation should revolve around how they can cultivate even more growth.
Additionally, when it comes to receiving constructive feedback, women miss out on this crucial element more throughout their career than men. The reality is that although the intent of avoiding constructive feedback may be well intended, it is ultimately restricting individual’s success. Providing an honest assessment of one’s work is an integral responsibility of leadership to deliver across the board.
Ultimately, this discussion should set the stage for an actionable plan you’ll create together.
Here are a few questions you might use to kick off this conversation:
What has happened since we last talked?
What obstacles or challenges are holding you back?
If you could do the past [month/ quarter/ year] over again, what would you do differently?
For more tips, watch this video where Ceresa Mentor Deidre Harvego, Senior Director of Engineering at Acrisure, shares her approach to performance reviews.
Step 2: Come up with a plan
Take time to learn more about your employees’ longer-term goals and aspirations, both inside and outside of work. How can you help ensure their current work is helping them move along the path toward achieving those goals? How can you foster an existing sense of purpose? As a supervisor responsible for performance management, it’s important that your direct reports see you as someone who is on their side and committed to their long-term success.
Establishing a broader understanding of what motivates your employee will help you, together with the employee, develop a meaningful, realistic plan that drives results. A plan can be as informal as discussing and agreeing on the next steps, or as formal as a career development plan.
But, regardless of structure, each plan should accomplish one of two things:
Accelerate the growth of strong employees
Identify high-performing employees’ biggest strengths, what they’re best at, and which skills enable them to be successful.Remediate the weaknesses of their weak employees
Identify underperforming employees’ biggest weaknesses and blind spots that could be holding them back from achieving their full potential.
Step 3: Determine necessary resources
After highlighting strengths and opportunities for growth, the next step is to figure out what resources they need and how they’ll hone the necessary skills to reach their goals.
First, leaders should ask employees what resources are available to help them reach their goals and what resources they’re missing. There are three areas you’ll want to consider:
Next Level Skills
Also called human skills or power skills, these strengths can help in any profession or career level. Here at Ceresa, we cover soft skills in our seven competency areas:Thinking Strategically
Leading Inclusively
High-Performance Teams
Communicating Effectively
Engaging Your Support Network
Leading Yourself Well
Knowing Yourself
Hard skills
Also called functional or technical skills, these are the strengths specific to an employee’s job duties, like proficiency in industry-specific software.
Personal life and wellness
Are there aspects of an employee's life outside of work that impact their performance or could help them reach their development goals?
Then, define how an employee will hone the skills necessary for growth. One way to do this is by leveraging the 70-20-10 framework:10% formal training, such as courses, lectures, videos, and textbooks
20% social engagement, such as mentorship, discussion boards, peer learning, and webinars
70% experiential learning, such as simulations, scenario-based learning, on-the-job projects, or daily tasks
Step 4: Acquire necessary resources
Finally, identify how you can help your employee access the resources they need to achieve the goals they’ve outlined. How can you ensure rising leaders receive the guidance and skill-building necessary to advance in their careers? (This is where personalized leadership development comes in handy.)
A few questions to consider during this step include:
Where can employees get the additional experience they need?
What cross-functional projects could allow them to leverage their experience in other business areas?
Where can you provide opportunities for them to practice?
“If you are leading a broader Human Resources team, consider offering clear learning and development paths to each individual based on their evaluation. When you determine a team member is high-potential, consider: What do you offer them to continue to invest in their growth and help retain them? Ceresa partners with leading companies to support their high-potential talent and rising leaders. ”
Moving Forward
After you’ve developed a plan, ensure you are regularly providing feedback and staying in touch with your employee. One way to do this is by incorporating a monthly high-performance meeting individually with your team. Creating an outline of their goals and progress, with real-time suggestions and guidance, can be pivotal in the collective growth of your team. Here are three questions that you can discuss:
What were your top accomplishment in the month that is ending?
What are the top accomplishments you want to achieve in the next month?
What can I do as your manager to support you?
By investing in your employees consistently and not waiting until the next performance review, you are further developing radical candor and retention.
Additionally, consider implementing 360-degree feedback tools and assessments for all employees’ goal-setting and ongoing growth.
For more tips, advice, and conversation-starters, download our free 360 Discission Guide.