Tips to make your next performance appraisal powerful & effective

We’ve written an article entitled “The Ten Stupid Things Managers Do To Screw Up Performance Appraisals”, but the truth is that managers don’t do dumb things just to fill up their time. A lotof the time we find that when managers are doing performance appraisals badly, they are getting a lot of “help”from their human [...]

Too many managers see performance reviews as something they “do” to employees and not something that have “done” to them. The hardest people to tie to a chair to discuss their performance are usually the CEO and Executive team – and yet their performance arguably has the greatest effect on the business. Employees watch how [...]

Many people complain that their annual performance review is not relevant as their duties and responsibilities have substantially changed since they set their last goals and objectives. This is a real challenge for many businesses. While some jobs stay fundamentally the same from year to year, other jobs flow and change almost like an amoeba. [...]

1. Lack Of Focus On Performance You’re measuring how well an employee has achieved job goals: how well the employee has performed at work. It’s not a measure of “dress” or “demeanour” or “attitude” or “relationships” or any of those fuzzy, waffly, social and emotional attributes that some managers love to include, inappropriately, in performance [...]

As I have mentioned before, conducting performance appraisals is not an exact science. You will always look at an employee through the eyes of your biases and personal values. In performance reviews, you need to measure the results and the performance of the individual or team, and not the personality of the person. Reviews based [...]

Following on from previous posts, I thought I would share why I believe annual performance reviews are useful. Human beings are hard wired in for reflection and goal setting – think about New Year’s Resolutions. They are the most common form of goal setting on the planet – and yet no one forces people to [...]

One of the most regular comments I have heard over the years is that annual performance reviews are just a waste of time. The reasons they give are that people hate doing them, they are just a crutch for poor managers to be seen to be doing something, there is no link to pay so [...]

During performance reviews it is easy to get caught up in trying to make your employee comfortable with your feedback and to reduce stress. Many managers do this by being less careful with their language than they should, which creates problems down the track. Here are some of the most common problems: Telling white lies [...]

If you have an employee who is not performing, it is easy to get to fall into all or nothing thinking – “they are a poor performer”. But before you leap into a blanket judgment here’s a few questions to ask yourself. 1. Did they fail on only one project? Not every project is a [...]

While popular literature tends to focus on employee’s nerves heading into review sessions, managers can also struggle at performance review time. Often highly charged with emotion the sessions can be extremely draining on all concerned. To prepare for the next employee performance review cycle, try some of these performance review tips: 1. Get ready to [...]