How Performance Reviews Are Making Work A Better Place

Performance reviews, when done properly, are great.

They allow for an employee to have a deep introspection about themselves, how they’ve performed, and where they can improve.

Unfortunately, many performance reviews in companies are done all wrong.

I’ve written before about how performance reviews can hurt an employee’s growth, and other problems with performance reviews, but they’re not all that bad.

It’s all in how they’re done.

The data shows that most managers don’t like doing these performance reviews, and find them a waste of their time.

Often, managers don’t see the point in doing this, and it’s forced on them from HR. So managers rarely prepare for these meetings, and don’t take them seriously.

Employees are smart, and for the most part, at least initially, they respect their managers, and want to learn from them. When they see their managers treat the process with such little regard, they obviously won’t take it seriously either.

Too Much Fear At Work

This is, in my opinion, the root problem of why performance reviews are so flawed.

There is an incredible amount of fear among employees, and their relationship with their managers is very fake.

There are a lot of corporate politics, and it’s always a tricky dance when talking to your manager in one of the closed, corporate environments.

You need to be communicating with each other as if you were friends.

You’re allowed to have disagreements, you’re allowed to argue, in fact, it’s better that you do. A difference of opinion is how great discussions happen and ideas are formed.

Managers often lack the soft skills required to approach some of these issues elegantly, and employees feel too scared to say how they really feel, so it makes for a very awkward conversation.

I think without fixing this root issue, you’ll never be able to have a good performance review.

How To Do A Good Performance Review

I actually had my quarterly performance review last week, and I thought it would be great to share it with you.

I won’t share everything, because some of it is actually quite personal to me, but I’ll detail how it went, and why as an employee, I thought this was a smart way to conduct a review.

Hopefully this helps anyone looking to improve their employee performance reviews, and gives some guidance on what to do.

1. Stengths And Weaknesses

My boss Dan and I went into a quiet room, and Dan gave me a piece of paper with 4 quadrants on it with different drawings, which are the same illustrations that we use for our weekly reviews.

The way it works, according to the image, is the happy face represents things I think went well since our last review, the sad face represents things I think went poorly since our last review, the light bulb stands for new ideas (more on this later), and the beers are self-praises – things I’m proud of.

He asked me to write down 3 things in each section, and then we would discuss later, based on notes he already had. This is a very important point.

The fact that I get to write this down serves as an introspection for me, and is a good way for myself to think about what I’ve accomplished over the last 3 months.

Once I wrote down my 3 things in each session, we talked about them, I explained why I wrote them, he told me if he agreed, disagreed, or had anything to add.

I’d recommend every manager reading this to try this method.

2. Happiness Levels

The next question he asked me, was to report how happy I am on a scale from 1-10.

I told him that it was an 8.5/10, and he asked me why it wasn’t 10/10, and what I could do to improve this number.

He also asked me about my happiness level outside of work, which was very nice of him.

One of the most important things to employees is if their manager shows a genuine interest in their personal well-being, and this was clear during this discussion.

This is something that can’t be faked though, so if you genuinely don’t care about your employees, don’t bother asking this one.

3. Objectives And Milestones

This was the part of the review where Dan spoke the most, and was based mostly on my “ideas” column from the strengths and weaknesses.

Dan asked me to try and forecast 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months out, and come up with measurable milestones that I could hit.

Then Dan mentioned what milestones he’d like to see me hit, and we spent most of this time just discussing, fairly informally, what it would take to accomplish. For example, one of the things I mentioned for the 6 month milestone was to be able to report a 9/10 for my happiness levels.

So then the question becomes what do I have to do to get there? And the answer is things like eating properly and exercise. I also started taking an online class called The Science Of Happiness, from UC Berkeley. That should probably help.

The way performance reviews make work better, is by allowing for that introspection.

If you’re doing performance reviews annually or quarterly, so much happens in between each session, and it’s hard to keep track of it all, that an exercise like this is amazing.

Do You Think Performance Reviews Make Work Better?

Do you have anything to add to the conversation? Let me know in the comments!

How Performance Reviews Are Making Work A Better Place