4. Get employee feedback. Effective performance reviews involve employee feedback. Your document should always include a place for employee comments. Employees should be allowed to provide written feedback about their review. Give them the opportunity to agree or disagree with their evaluation, and let them do it in writing.
5. Set up a commitment for the next cycle. The results of the review should dictate the timeframe for the next review. If there are performance issues or specific goals that must be met, pick an appropriate intermediate time period in which to reconvene. It's a natural part of a follow up.
6. Discuss goals and career development. Employee buy-in to the performance review cycle can hinge on this step. "Most employees dread the thought of discussing historical information, yet get excited when you talk about their career development," Helmlinger says. Make this step a joint venture with your employee. Have them lay out their goals and objectives for the next three to nine months. Be sure their plans are in alignment with your organizational objectives. Then follow up with them. Without follow up, the process becomes a meaningless exercise that could negatively impact employee job satisfaction and turnover.
Dig Deeper: How to Conduct an Annual Employee Review
Instituting an Employee Review Process: Pitfalls to Avoid in Conducting Employee Reviews
Too often, employee reviews get a bad rap because they're used for pettiness or as a vehicle for a manager's favoritism. Here are some of the tendencies to avoid when rating employees during a review process:
- The Halo Effect. This occurs when an employee excels in one area and the manager lets that trait or factor influence their ratings under every category in the review process. "This problem often occurs with employees who are especially friendly (or unfriendly) toward the supervisor or especially strong (or weak) in one skill," Rowson says. To avoid the halo effect, evaluate all your people on one performance factor before going to another factor. This way the evaluation is based on the factors more than an overall impression of one individual.
- Leniency or harshness errors. Sometimes the person doing the rating of an employee can show their own personal bias. "If you think everyone is great, then everyone deserves an Academy Award," Rowson says. "When raters see everything as 'good,' they are lenient raters. When they see everything as 'bad,' they are harsh raters." Look over your ratings to see if you display any of these tendencies and even consider using a "grading" distribution like they use in school -- with 10 percent of employees exemplary, 20 percent distinguished, 40 percent competent, 20 percent marginal, and 10 percent unacceptable.
- Central tendency. Another pitfall is to rate everyone somewhere near the middle. "'Central tendency' describes what happens when you tend to put ever
yone in the middle of the road and rate all of your subordinates as 'competent,'" Rowson says. The problem with this tendency is it fails to discriminate between employees and offers little information for subsequent decisions. If you have this tendency, you will never differentiate performance between those who have done exceptional work and those who have had a poor performance. "It drives top performers nuts," Rowson says. "You'll lose your best people this way."
- First impression. Whether your first impression is positive or negative, this should not be the basis for performance evaluation. Some workers end up riding on that first impression for the rest of the year. To avoid this, go back to the job description and performance documentation. "This will take the emphasis away from gut level feelings and superficial impressions and focus your evaluation on facts and behavior," Rowson says.
- Personal bias. People tend to identify with others who are like them; this is true for managers and their employees who sometimes give a higher rating because the employee has qualities similar to him or her (or a lower rating because the employee has dissimilar qualities). Raters have to watch out for exhibiting this bias simply because they like certain employees better than others, Rowson says.
Any type of favoritism can undermine all the good will you seek to bring to your business when instituting an employee review process.
Dig Deeper: Taking the Sting Out of Workplace Evaluations
Instituting an Employee Review Process: Additional Resources
Implementing an Effective Performance Review System
The Society of Human Resources Management has some advice for instituting a successful review program.
http://www.shrm.org/books/performanceappraisal/excerpt.asp
Performance Review Software:
http://www.authoria.com/cp/performance-review-software
Authoria Performance helps organizations turn employee appraisal into a tool for building a stronger workforce that can deliver greater business results.
http://www.halogensoftware.com/products/halogen-eappraisal/
Halogen Software's eAppraisal offers a powerful, easy-to-use, and affordable Web-based solution for employee reviews.
http://www.insala.com/performance-management/performance-review.asp
Insala's iPerformance offers a timesaving collection of tools that integrates the complete evaluation process to include job profiling, competency management, assessment, reviews, and development plan creation.
World at Work
http://www.worldatwork.org
This global human resources association focuses on compensation, benefits, work-life, and integrated total rewards to help organizations attract, motivate, and retain a talented workforce.
