There are supervisors who see a performance review as just another task in addition to the mounting tasks on their tables.
To employees and some team heads, performance reviews can feel like a grilling moment accompanied with sweaty palms, a pounding heart, and so forth.
Yet, as the employer, you can use the employee performance review as a motivational tool to increase performance of lagging employees and to recognize fruitful efforts.
With the right preparation, you can use the performance review to sizzle an employee's life at work by following these performance review tips for an effective performance review.
Effective Performance Review Tips
1. Use work logs to help facilitate writing employee performance reviews
Even the sharpest of memories cannot be relied on when writing a work performance review, and doing so puts a heavier strain on you.
Understanding that a performance review is a yearlong process can help team leads accurately track employee performance.
Instituting a recording system that documents employee performance would prove useful when it's time to prepare job performance reviews.
Implementing work logs for each employee is a very easy and effective way of recording employee performance.
2. Conducting a constructive job performance review
At times, discussing an employee's problem areas can be dreading to managers and supervisors who give the performance review.
Rather than making an uncomfortable scenario out of an important meeting, discuss the problem areas you've observed within the evaluation period.
Be sure to discuss each problem area individually and restrain yourself from proceeding to the next issue unless after a thorough discussion of the present one.
You may use this framework to effectively discuss each problem: describe the performance issue, emphasize standard performances, develop an improvement plan, offer how you as the team leader or the company can help, alternate positive and negative comments, stress potentials.
3. Turn negatives into positives
Do not include an employee's personal traits in the review because, remember, a performance review is supposedly an objective record of a staff member's work performance.
To be effective at this, use nonjudgmental language that directs results and behavior. Use positive language when stating a negative. Take the statements as examples.
Say this: “Your last three reports contained an unacceptable number of statistical errors.” (Positive, puts details) Instead of this: “Your work has been sloppy lately.” (negative, too vague)
4. Helping employees reach their highest performance
This is often easier said than done, but managers and supervisors know too well it takes more than just an employee's hard work to reach high performance.
Help employees reach their full productivity by involving them when setting goals then ask what they can achieve. However, make sure that you set realistic goals – any goals should be difficult, desirable, but doable in order to maintain the challenge of work.
Additionally, avoid micromanaging, which means to let employees find a way around doing their tasks.
5. Steer away from these two common errors
- Evaluating attitudes, not performance. Unspecific statements directed at an employee's demeanor can be interpreted as something different from what you want to convey. If you have to include criticisms, cite specific instances to illustrate them.
- Inflated evaluation. Rating employee performance higher than their actual performance has two risks. It can set off the “I won't try” or “what's the use” attitude. First, an employee can think getting a higher rate even while half-trying could still get him/her a good performance review. Should the employee be fired due to poor performance, the decision can be retracted because the records say otherwise and the dismissal can be charged as illegal.
Objective and accurate performance reviews can be very useful tools, especially to a workforce requiring motivational tools to encourage productivity among employees.
