Performance Reviews Are Important No Matter How Small Or New Your Company Is.
Providing employees with regular feedback is key to maintaining engagement, high productivity levels, and retaining top talent. That’s why you should start early when considering ways to implement performance reviews. Whether you decide to focus on giving each worker an overall performance review or simply give ongoing responses throughout a project’s life cycle, regular feedback is an essential part of any successful business.
The following steps will help you establish a plan to ensure your organization has a system in place for leveraging these reviews to their full potential.
1. Discuss Options
Although it’s widely agreed that performance reviews are necessary, simply holding them once a year isn’t effective or valuable according to most employees. Discuss other options with your HR team. You may be better off leveraging tool that makes providing regular feedback much easier. This is especially worth considering if your team is remote and you need a resource that helps you remain in contact with them. With more and more people working from home these days, you may find yourself in a position where you need to maintain contact with employees outside of the office. Embracing the right feedback tool ahead of time is a good way to prepare.
2. Talk With Managers
You need to make sure each manager responsible for implementing performance reviews knows enough about the employees they’re reviewing to provide relevant feedback. However, you also don’t want to overwhelm managers by giving them too many employees to review. Discuss your plans with team leaders to establish a system that works for everyone.
3. Set Standards
Once you’ve established a program and decided what tools you’ll use to offer performance reviews, coordinate with HR to outline performance standards that strongly reflect the company values. Of course, he specifics of each review will vary depending on the nature of an employee’s work. But, it’s still a good idea to put forward a general idea of what you expect from employees in regards to interpersonal skills, motivation levels, and other essentials.
4. Train
Train managers to use the performance review program and let them know they can always ask questions if they need to. If you do use a tool that allows managers to provide employees with feedback on a consistent basis, you want to be sure everyone fully understands
Let managers know they can also use these tools to solicit feedback from employees. If they gather honest feedback and use it to adjust their management style, staff will be happy to know they’re working at a company where their opinion is valued. Of course, as your company grows, you can always make changes to your performance review system if necessary. In the meantime, it’s still essential to set one up sooner rather than later. Following these steps makes it easy to start offering the kind of feedback that helps employees thrive.