Why Your Annual Performance Review Process Isn't Working (and How to Fix It)

Описание: With a top-down performance management process, your people are having that conversation, but they're not walking away from it with the information they need. It's more a check-the-box activity.

Instead, Jamie Resker suggests creating a process that's flexible enough that the employee gets to choose the questions and topics that are important to them. Watch the video to learn why this works and how to recreate this process in your office.

For more great tips like these, download Saba's Definitive Handbook for Creating Exceptional Experiences at Work here: http://bit.ly/2ovAsAM

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Transcript:
My advice for organizations looking to modernize or evolve their approach to performance management feedback coaching is to put together a system that's flexible enough so that the employee gets to choose the questions and the topics that are important to them that they want to bring up in a discussion with their manager.

Instead of a top-down led process, which typically looks like the performance review - here are the ratings, here are the competencies, here's one to fill out the paperwork, here's one to do yourself review. That's basically people just saying, “Okay, HR has told me that I have to do this and I've got to check this off the list”.

They have the conversation, but they're not walking away from that conversation saying, “Wow, that was the best conversation I've ever had about me and my performance. I got exactly the information that I need. I figured out what I do well right now that I should leverage. I know what I should be focused on next”. What you want to do is you want to put together some sort of a ‘conversation guide’ that allows people to choose the questions and the topics that they're going to talk about from meeting to meeting, whether those meetings take place every week, every other week, every month.

I would say the conversation should start off with the employee highlighting one thing that's gone well recently, one thing they achieved. They get to talk, they get to have a question asked of them about something that they're interested in. So, the manager may ask, “What's one thing you want to get better at? What's one thing you want to learn about? What's one thing you want to be involved in? What's one thing you think the team hasn’t accomplished that you'd like to contribute to?”.

Then the employee gets to pick up a question about what they're doing well, so they could ask their manager something like, “What's one thing I'm doing well that I should continue with?” or “What's one thing you rely on me for?”. Then they get to ask a question about their development or future contribution.

Again, you want to have a menu of questions that somebody can choose from. So you might have a question that the employee chooses, “What's one thing I could do to be more effective in my role?” or “What's next for me to focus on?” or “What's one way I could improve my interpersonal skills?” or “What's one way I could support the team more?”.

What happens is that because the employee gets to pick the questions, the conversation is going to be more tailored and more meaningful. Again, you want the manager to also be asking for some feedback, so the manager is going to ask very similar questions to the employee. So, “What's one thing I'm doing, as your manager, to support you that is working that I should continue with? What's one way I could support you more? What's one thing I could do to work better with you? What's one thing you would like to learn from me that I can teach you?”. And again, you want to have a list of questions that people get to choose from so it's not just a conversation about, “Hey, how do you think things are going? How do you think we're working together?”. Because the answer is going to be good or great. “What can I do better?”. “Nothing, just keep doing what you're doing”.

You want to make sure that those questions are designed to stimulate some conversation. So, a higher-level conversation about performance and development, and also include some things in there about the work relationship between the manager and the employee. You know, what's working and how could you support me even more as my manager moving ahead?

Then at the very end, that you have some action items. What are the action items or takeaways from this conversation? The whole thing should take about 10 minutes to ask and answer these questions. I have a model; I call it the ‘10 Minute Questions Conversation’.

Again, my advice is to walk away from those HR-designed, very well-intentioned systems of annual performance reviews and ratings that happen once a year and look backwards to these ongoing conversations. But you do need to provide some guidance and some tools and even some training, so that the conversations that people are having go beyond just the transactional day-to-day conversations about tasks and projects.

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