Focus on Performance

It’s time to update your performance reviews to get results.

I’m not sure that I have ever met anyone who enjoys the traditional sit-down, in-person performance review, including the managers who conduct them. Regardless of the system, timing or forms used, performance evaluations can be an emotional, complicated and an administratively tedious process.

The pandemic has not helped matters either. This is especially true for organizations whose employees worked from home and where the performance management programs relied on traditional indicators, such as attendance, tardiness, dress code and highly subjective and intangible characteristics, such as attitude. During the pandemic, results have become the key indicator of performance, as all of the other once observable traditional performance criteria is no longer in play.

Many companies have scrambled to assess their existing performance review systems and reinvent programs that make sense for today’s working conditions. A results-based performance review system, without all of the traditional fluff, may be in order. To ensure that your organization has the foundation for such a program, consider the following three steps:

Update Job Descriptions

This is the perfect time to review job descriptions and make sure they accurately reflect the duties and responsibilities of every position in your organization. To be successful, this process should be done with employee input.

Review Performance Expectations

Once job descriptions have been updated, specific and measurable performance expectations should be developed for each position in the organization.

Update Your Performance Review Program

With all of the changes occurring and expected to happen in the workplace, there may not be a better time to modify your company’s performance management program. Many employees have become happily accustomed to being reviewed based purely upon the results of their work during the pandemic. To revert to a traditional system with archaic forms may not work in this new era of how, when and where we work.

In addition to these three steps, remember that a formal performance review should be a two-way conversation between the person conducting the review and the employee being evaluated. In my career, I often found asking the following questions during the performance review was helpful in encouraging an open and honest conversation relative to an employee’s job performance: 1. How are you doing? 2. Do you really like your job? (Followed by why or why not?) 3. Is there anything you would like to see changed in your job? (Please be specific.) 4. What can I do better to help support your success? (Please be specific.) 5. Are you happy here? (Followed by why or why not?)

The answers to my questions were quite helpful to fully understand if the person being evaluated was engaged with their job and our organization and interested and willing to improve their job performance.

Lastly, keep in mind that a performance management program will only be effective in a workplace environment where nonmanagement employees trust the process and trust their bosses. Without that trust, virtually any program put forth by HR and organizational leaders is doomed to fail. 

Pat Perry is host of the national Success Wave podcast, business book author, keynote speaker, former ERC president, columnist, NEO Business Hall of Fame member and was named to the 2021 Cleveland 500.

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