Performance Appraisals

Hello Everybody,

Lets kick off the new year with a subject all people managers should be involved in or at least thinking about... giving feedback to their employees (commonly known as a Performance Appraisals) to help align company or team objectives with their team members progress and improve your teams results and cohesiveness.

Here is a great set of documents that would get you off the ground if this is something you would implement from scratch, a self contained start up pack for the newbies to their roles or to someone who wants to start a new level of professionalism in their teams.

http://02616qhg0rq3c7ijikptalaq73.hop.clickbank.net/ 

A few quotes to inspire you:

“The goal is to guide the manager and the employee in a productive conversation. These aren't conversations to be dreaded or avoided. Performance reviews are a crucial opportunity for improvement.”

“If you haven't given your appraisal process serious thought, it's probably time. Today, as the economy recovers, employee engagement and retention are among the most important drivers of success“

“Managers need to learn how to coach people well, leveraging recognition and feedback not just evaluation”

“Boss-less teams often outperform manager led teams”

However, for those looking for more advice keep reading…

Prepare

·         For sure you want to have your team member’s personal targets which align with some business achievements for the company included.  Which means you need their input prepared on this BEFORE you have the review session prepared by the employee so that they help also in generating and more importantly participating in the 2 way conversation ( I had in the past not done this, all that happens is you run a monologue and type something up yourself with the employee in the room, non engaging for them for sure…).  Make a structure have the personal results or tasks of the member (helping to make them feel valued you know at least some of what they do)

Inform

·         Set the time and place where you will meet for the discussion, give them time to prepare.  Make sure you location is somehow confidential, you don’t want others listening in or commenting for or against the discussion or to be shouting over all the other conversations in the room, it just isn’t helpful for constructive progress for both members with distractions in the background. Set the agenda at the start to make it easy to follow for both employee and employer

Introduction

·         set out the schedule, normally closing off the comments and results from last year, how would you like this year to look personally and professionally with tasks to realistically achieve that, when are the reviewing periods of this conversation happening again? Development planning ideas to progress the employee and get them with more skills to assist you or the team for more of a partnership rather than individualistic result.

Review and measure

·         If you have prepared, the structure, the delivery should also be reviewed before this conversation so that it flows and make sense, you don’t want to be bouncing around subjects that don’t appear to be connected because they aren't in the right order. Be objective with this conversation, this is meant to be progressive and encouraging (it can be corrective, but think how to work that into positive conversation-you do this task really well, if you can complete the last 10% of these things it will be amazing).  Bring data that can help you arrange the appraisal support structure (technical info) that will help you build the soft conversation (skills, talents and progresses coming). 

Agree an action plan and objectives with support

·         Including career aspirations, strengths and weaknesses, that include departmental or organisational goals or objectives, what things you can personally support, what things that you can ask others to help them with, what can be individualistic (research from the internet) etc

Other points/questions

·         Invite them to bring up subjects of positivity or negativity to make the feeling this was productive and I got all the information I want to share out or progressed for both the employee and the employer.  This helps you build trust but also brings topics which can help you and the team overall outside the one person conversation progress.

Close positively and record

·         Make sure to thank them for the previous year, their efforts on certain tasks that went well.  The negatives/corrective comments should be done and not repeated to bring a bad feeling on the close. Follow ups should be planned both from the employee side and yours, when and how. Document it for reference (having larger teams makes this a necessity), send it to the person and this helps to have an open conversation next time as well as allow the employee to think and progress on the points they can.  Don’t forget the employee can remind you if you slipped with a task for them… invite that as it could really help you avoid a future disappointed conversation.

Finally, Good Luck for you and your teams performance !!!