As your company approaches 20+ employees, it will become clear that you can’t track performance feedback in a spreadsheet. You can try! But this will get messy very quickly. So we’ve put together some guidelines to help you avoid spreadsheet purgatory. The guidelines will address how to:
Hopefully these guidelines and tips help you motivate and engage your employees. The earlier you think about a systematic performance management process in the workplace, the better alignment you will have between employees, their career goals and overall company objectives.
Like our What Ifs, this is a living document that we’ll edit and update as we learn and get feedback. We look forward to a thoughtful and productive conversation about this topic. Don’t hesitate to contact Beth Scheer, Homebrew’s Head of Talent, if we can help your startup think through these issues.
Huge thank you to Kim Scott at Radical Candor for her input on this working document.
Giving and receiving performance feedback is a crucial part of career development. In startup culture, where things move at a frenetic pace, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to wait a year to find out where they stand in terms of performance. Employees need constant feedback so they can adjust their behavior and make improvements or modifications. If no feedback is given by managers or peers for an entire year, too much time goes by without feedback and without alignment on goals and how to measure success.
So what works?
There are strong business reasons to set goals: