Ask anyone what they think of a performance review and you'll likely get a shudder or grimace. Employees often resent them, managers hate the many hours it takes to do them, and HR struggles to get the value that ideally should be gotten from them.
In this guest post by Eric Jorgenson, creator of the Evergreen Business Weekly, he takes a deep dive into what the experts have said about the performance review, how they're reinventing them, and even how some well-known companies are replacing them altogether.
If you enjoy this deep dive on the performance review, I highly recommend you sign up to receive all his posts here. Evergreen has also guest-posted on Lighthouse on Employee Retention, Firing, and Organizational Communication.
Evergreens are designed to feel like short books, you're meant to meander and spend ~3 hours on this topic this week. Save some of these links and read them throughout the week. Immerse yourself in this topic and leave the week smarter than you started!
No one looks forward to their performance review. Yet the idea behind them is simple and optimistic: provide feedback, coaching, and what the results of past performance mean for an employee's future compensation and career.
Apprehension about performance reviews often leads to sub-par effort by managers, and dismissal from the employee's side — which is neither helpful nor productive. It turns out that with some awareness of the potential pitfalls, reviews can be easy, productive, and beneficial.
This Evergreen is everything you need to know to make your performance reviews simple, easy, and productive. And maybe even not terrifying. Here's what we've got in this Edition of Evergreen:
Enjoy the read, and hopefully you'll find something you can apply to your team.
The best place to start for most management topics is, of course with Andy Grove of Intel and his classic management book, High Output Management.
He devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 13: Performance Appraisal) to guidance on how to do performance reviews, and why they are so important to a manager's toolkit. This is the best resource on the traditional performance review, full of fantastic insight and advice from a man who has a lifetime of lessons to teach on management.
Grove strongly believes in the importance of Performance Reviews as he wrote:
The fact is that giving such reviews is the single most important form of task-relevant feedback we as supervisors can provide.The long and short of it: if performance matters in your operation, performance reviews are absolutely necessary.
As Grove puts it, the most crucial function of performance reviews is to improve employee performance. Every other function is secondary to that.
In order to execute excellent performance reviews, we have to start with the assessment process itself, as Grove states: