Essential Performance Review Tips For Employers

  • June 28, 2021
  • Humantelligence
Most employees have had to undergo a performance review at some point in their careers. No matter how anxiety-inducing the experience is for employers and employees, employee performance review tips often make a significant impact on everyone involved. The performance review process allows employers to set expectations, spur improvements, inspire employee engagement, identify promotion opportunities, and provide training courses to help employees succeed in your organization. It offers benefits to employees, too — allowing them to identify and measure their progress, see their value within your company, and help determine how well-suited they are to their current career path. Here are seven performance review tips to help you conduct evaluations with real impact for your employees and business. 1. Define Your Organization’s Standards for Employee Performance Appraisals A great way to determine how to approach the staff review process is to establish your organization’s standards. Your standards help you achieve your goals, so it’s only logical to set and ensure that everyone works to adhere to those standards. You might use your company vision and mission statement to offer employees a broad stroke view of your standards, but you can communicate in more detail in your employee manual.  2. Establish a Clear Performance Review Processfor All Employees The sooner you let prospective or current employees know your approach to staff performance reviews, the sooner they can understand how to prepare to meet and exceed your expectations. By developing an across-the-board structure regarding your expectations, you help everyone understand what is expected. Here, you can provide details regarding the following:
  • Organizational and departmental onbjectives
  • The staff member — whether an HR representative or a department manager or supervisor — who will conduct the review
  • The means of measuring their performance, including key performance indicators for employee evaluation (i.e., KPIs)
  • The frequency of appraisals — whether annually or every three or six months
  • The communication process in letting employees know their evaluation results, such as in-person and/or via email or your company’s intranet portal
3. Foster a Strong Corporate Culture That Clearly Supports Your Mission, Standards and Employees’ Success With a strong and upbeat corporate culture, you can maintain a positive environment that organically supports everyone’s success. When employees know how valuable they are to your business’s success, you’ll find that employees who care about their job may be happy to take the steps needed to succeed for their benefit and yours. 4. Increase the Frequency of Performance Reviews  To help your company run smoothly, continually steer employees toward success. Just like you need to maintain the big picture goals for your organization, you need to help keep employees on track. Doing so once a year isn’t enough for peak performance. Think about all that you need to address and track, as far as what you expect from your employees to guarantee their success and yours — such as their teamwork involvement and productivity. You will quickly see how vital it is to keep your finger on the pulse of their progress and provide feedback regularly. Just as important, in one survey, 67% of respondents indicated they prefer regular feedback instead of the traditional and oft-dreaded annual review. Companies listening to this call increasingly offer six-month and three-month employee appraisals to help everyone stay on course for success and satisfaction. 5. Rely on KPIs to Provide Employees With Solid Examples of Strengths and Weaknesses  The best way to help employees improve is by offering clear, decisive and reasonable performance appraisal strengths and weaknesses examples. One vital way to measure performance is through KPIs that serve as guideposts to point your employees in the right direction, leading to their success and yours. The best KPIs are often referred to as SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely), serving as a critical tool to find objective and relevant information about your employees’ performance. This strategy enables everyone with the tools to improve by closing learning gaps and inspiring employees to take meaningful action, such as seeking additional training or a department mentor.  6. Offer Employees Tips and Examples for How to Follow Through on Improvements  Give your team actionable performance review tips that might include:
  • Focus on better time management
  • Commit to caring and compassionate customer service
  • Collaborate with enthusiasm and confidence for enhanced teamwork
  • Work on interpersonal skills for improved one-on-one interactions with fellow employees and management
  • Accept constructive criticism in the positive spirit in which it is given
While it might feel challenging to give personnel this feedback, it is necessary to help employees grow within your organization and feel like valued team members. Offer these tips firmly while tempering them with tact, grace, kindness, and the goal and hope of spurring their success. 7. Leverage the Right Employee Engagement Suite Your employee performance reviews should allow for a dialogue between you and your employee. Businesses increasingly use reliable employee engagement suites that help align and motivate employees to focus on key strategic goals, tasks and actions. It’s a way to fast-track employees’ understanding of your organization’s goals on a daily and long-term basis. Incorporating a top-notch learning management system and offering actionable content can ramp up the onboarding process and help employees stay up to date with any new performance management processes. Here are a few additional benefits of an employee engagement suite and performance management system:
  • Motivates employees through gamification to spur innovative ideas to enhance systems and processes and develop talent
  • Allows you to prepare training strategies and sessions and employee surveys using a powerful culture analytics module to better gauge your needs according to your employee population’s culture, attitudes and needs
  • Intertwines engagement into daily work processes to spark and nurture ongoing conversations, making feedback nearly continuous

Learn More Tips and Strategies to Make Performance Reviews Meaningful and Effective

If you would like an in-depth discussion about your approach to employee performance appraisals, our Humantelligence team is here to help. Contact us to learn more about using powerful solutions that drive success for your business.

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