All those who really dislike employee reviews, please raise
your hand. What everyone? Well not surprising. Most of us hate doing things that show
no purpose, progress or value. For
most of us, the employee review is just that, a waste of time.
These days, everyone wants their feedback immediately, no
waiting. That has produced some
good movement in the halls of business.
Managers to CEOs spend more time observing, listening and coaching.
With all the immediacy, is there any reason anymore to do
employee reviews? I am going to
provide a qualified yes. The
qualification comes from how we must break away from form and focus on
content.
Recently, I was working with a client and, as a relatively
new business owner, he was asking about employee reviews. He is smart, earnest and does not want
to waste time, his or his employees. Like me, at the beginning of my career, he
wants to provide value and feels that employee reviews are important. I listened and found myself thinking
that I would not want to be in the review process at this company.
We talked for a while about reviews and I came away with an
unsettling question …. Why after several decades of managing people am I still
unresolved about how and when to provide employee reviews. Throughout my career I have shifted
from feeling that employee reviews were a waste of time, to useful and back
again to feeling that I can do better and employees can receive better if I
scrap once or twice a year employee reviews.
One of the major reasons Executives conduct employee reviews
is to catalog and correct the past (what the employee did) and set guides for
the future (what the employee will do six months from now.
Unfortunately, both the future and the past are simply
markers and don’t change or improve behaviors. Over the years, I have come to believe that intention, focus
and immediacy are more important than any other factors to influence/improve
people. Being a fairly simple guy,
challenged by keeping too much in my head and I know that I learn better if I
avoid taking on too much and I improve at what ever I am doing if I focus down
to one or two skills/issues.
So, I will be bold here and suggest that you do something
different…. Come up with a clear issue on which you and the employee agree is
the issue most in need of improvement and the strength most valuable to
continue to improve. The strength
is usually not difficult to arrive at and doing so in a collaborative way with
your report is likely to increase the success rate for achieving the
improvement.
To determine on which issue your report should improve,
obtain the feedback of three to five people (the peers, people reporting to
your report and one person who is either outside your company (customer) or who
is outside the employee’s department.
Complete a start, stop and continue questionnaire/interview (simply
asking what the person completing the questionare/interview thinks Sam or Jane
should start doing that they are not now doing; continue doing something that
is liked/good and what should they stop doing)
Let the subject of the start stop and continue have a list
of those issues, on one condition:
They have to choose one issue, from the list, on which they will
improve. Then they must meet with
each of the people providing feedback; show them the list; tell them on which
issue the report has chosen to work; and (this is key) ask each of those
providing feedback to help she/he with the chosen issue for improvement.
Your job then
becomes: adding one
strategic/longer range point on which they work and coaching to make sure the
report is a success around the chosen issue.
Keep on walking around. Keep providing immediate feedback. Just focus yourself on making the feedback serve you and
your employee. Define and agree on
what that focus will be and what will be the outcome. Create measures.
Coach, teach and mentor to those defined issues and create consequences
for the outcome(s).
You may even find you aren’t dreading employee reviews
anymore. So, what do you do to
make reviews more effective?
No comments:
Post a Comment