Nobody likes having their time wasted. Just because you are in a performance appraisal, which is supposed to be useful, doesn’t mean that the time is actually being well spent.
You need to get the most out of these performance appraisal sessions because they can provide invaluable insight when done well.
Firstly there is nothing more annoying than turning up to a meeting and finding that nobody really knows what the point of the meeting is. We talked about wasted time at work due to inefficient meetings which you can read as well.
The answer to this is simple. Keep notes of every appraisal you have with an employee and base your questions on things that were raised previously. This way, you are getting a clear picture of what was happening before and what has changed/ improved since.
Find out how our clients improved their performance management.
Here are some of my tips to make your performance reviews more successful:
Active listening – Active listening is all about actually hearing and understanding what someone is saying, not just listening enough to formulate a reply. For example, you can ask someone something like, “Just to make sure I understand, you…”, or “Just to be clear…”. Encourage someone to continue by probing for more details and ask questions. You can read our post about having better conversations here.
Encourage self-evaluation – By getting employees to think about their own performance before a review, they get into a good mindset for feedback and for thinking about accomplishments and areas for improvement. It is also a great way for employees to grow too. We wrote a post about the right questions to ask employees which you can read here.
Some more review orientated questions could be:
- What do you think you could have done better?
- What do you want to improve by our next review?
Give praise – By keeping regular and useful notes about your employee reviews you will be able to give specific praise to your employee about their accomplishments. It is easy to see these sessions as an opportunity to get everything out there that has been building up over the past month and vent it at them all at once. This is not a productive thing to do. If you have any issues with an employee’s performance, you should tell them straight away, unless it is something ongoing that is relevant to a subject that you have been discussing during reviews. Of course, it won’t all be sunshine and rainbows but praise is just as important as addressing issues.
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