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Performance Reviews Help Create Great Employees
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Article 2: Review Employee Performance Regularly
Mention performance review, and most of us think of a dreary annual meeting where a supervisor browbeats an employee thinking about a pay raise.
Effective evaluations, though, are far different.
For starters, they are positive in tone. More important though, is their role as support for a continuing initiative of daily feedback.
“It’s very important to maintain an ongoing ‘back and forth’ throughout the year between supervisor and employee,” advises Dick Grote, a Dallas-based performance management consultant.
Regular supervisory feedback keeps employees on track and corrects habits that have a negative effect on your business. Most important, it reinforces productive behaviors.
“Good supervisors let employees know what they are doing well,” notes Grote.
Effective feedback also enhances the team nature of the workplace.
“Good supervisors put the emphasis on Us,” says Grote. “The more you couch your feedback in terms of ‘how We are doing’ the more effective your feedback will be.”
Here’s some good news: The identification of an individual employee’s goals with those of the organization is an area where small businesses, with their close-knit human network, have a leg up over the big corporate competition.
Of course, regular and specific workplace feedback is not a panacea. There’s real value in having structured annual discussions where supervisors and employees discuss how things are going and what steps need to be taken in the year ahead.
Indeed, sometimes the formal review is the only environment where sub-par performance can be addressed in a way that makes a difference.
“Human beings have an infinite capacity for self-delusion,” notes Grote. “With some people it won’t matter how many times you have corrected them during the year. They will still say they did not understand.”
In such cases the formal review is the right setting for establishing precise performance parameters that the employee is expected to achieve over the coming year.
Even so, annual reviews will go much smoother when employees have had the benefit of regular feedback. Keep unhappy surprises to a minimum by allowing employees to correct any sub-par performance areas throughout the year.
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