“Hack the Performance Review!” That’s a headline we’ve all read somewhere. This is, after all, 2018, and why would something as arcane as a performance review be worth doing? Can’t we all just take a blood test to figure out if we’re doing well at work? Or better yet, isn’t there an AI/ML algorithm for that? Rather than rattle off a bunch of reasons why performance reviews matter — I’m gonna give just one important, albeit kind of long, reason:
A performance review is an opportunity for an employee to evaluate their recent performance through candid feedback from others, to reevaluate their longer-term personal and professional aspirations, and to reaffirm (or not) their commitment to the company’s vision, mission, values, and goals.
Ok, if you agree with this meaty definition — even just a smidge — keep reading. Below is an outline of how we have constructed our performance review process at Remind. By no means is our approach perfect nor is my rundown here exhaustive, but it may potentially augment your company’s thinking about the importance of defining, developing, and committing to a consistent performance review process.
Frequency. Twice per year is our cadence — once at the end of the calendar year leading into the New Year (which typically aligns with a budget planning process), and again in the middle of the year (which may align with a re-forecast update for the business). Doing performance reviews once isn’t frequent enough to provide helpful feedback to your employees, while quarterly performance reviews are too often as they don’t provide enough time for folks to make meaningful progress towards goals and initiatives.
Team Engagement Metrics. Figure out a quantifiable way to measure how engaged your team members are across the company and at the department or group level. We have created a team engagement survey or what we call the “TES” which asks team members to reply to the core 12 questions from the Gallup Organization’s decades of organizational research highlighted in the book “First, Break All The Rules”. Per the Gallup research, answers to the top six questions provide a measurable way to gage how engaged your team is, and the TES results can then be used in the context of performance review discussions as well as ongoing performance management conversations between employees and managers.
Rubrics. Rubrics define the specific attributes or behaviors that are most important for your to employees to embody at both a company and department level. For example, our company rubrics are: 1) Results — deliver against company goals and key initiatives , 2) Entrepreneurship — bring creativity, curiosity, and an appetite for taking appropriate risks to daily efforts, 3) Culture — live our company mission, vision, and values, and 4) Manager —build relationships with team members to create optimal performance from everyone on your team. In addition to these four company-wide rubrics, each department at Remind has established rubrics that capture the attributes central to that group. These department level rubrics help employees understand what’s expected of them within their functional areas of expertise (i.e. engineering, product, customer success, marketing, sales, etc.).
Employee Levels. Once the core set of attributes or behaviors are defined for each rubric, they then need to be defined for various employee levels within your company. One set of rubrics should apply to non-manager (i.e. individual contributor or “IC”) employees. Obviously there can be a substantial range of levels for ICs beginning with entry level employees, and then scaling to individuals who are ultimately quite senior and accomplished. The other set of levels apply to managers. Again, ranges can vary from new managers who may manage just 1–2 team members, to very senior managers and executive team (“e-team”) leaders who oversee entire departments.
Assessments. Perhaps the most important elements of the performance review process are the people-driven assessments that come together:
Self assessments — The employee assesses their performance over the previous six-month period per the company-wide and department level rubrics. Citing specific examples to support a self assessment is critical so that the overall performance review can be developed in an objective versus subjective manner. Ideally much of this has been documented by employees and managers over the course of the previous six months within their 1–1 conversations.
Peer assessments — Selecting a handful (3 to 5) colleagues from within the employee’s group, as well as from other functional areas, to provide feedback augments the information gathered in the self and manager assessments. Again, citing specific examples is most helpful within these peer reviews, and peers should understand that some of their comments may be shared by the manager with the employee as part of the overall performance review. Sharing this peer feedback can oftentimes be the most enlightening and helpful feedback an employee receives during the performance review process.
Manager — The manager’s assessment combines information from the self assessment, peer assessments, and additional information that the manager feels is important to include in the overall performance review based on their own experiences working with the team member. If the manager’s assessment can be tied back to the rubric attributes per the employee’s current level (and the next level up), that’s the best way to ensure that the feedback will be most helpful to the employee over the ensuing six months.
Bringing it all together. Once the assessments have been completed, there are a few pieces that need to be assembled so that the performance review process is completed in a way that deepens the relationship between employees and their managers:
Delivering the review —No single format reigns supreme, though it’s helpful if there is some consistency in your company so if ICs move from one manager to a new manager, the performance review process remains familiar to them. The key here is to ensure that managers and employees use the performance review delivery conversation to align around 1) where the employee should focus their talents and skills to support the company’s growth and 2) where the manager and company can support the employee’s long-term growth in areas that matter most to the employee.
Leveraging talents vs improving weaknesses — Within the performance review process, being able to identify where an employee’s natural talents might be most utilized, and then figuring out how to enable the employee to do more of what they’re “good at”, is always a higher impact effort than encouraging the employee to spend a bunch of time trying to improve in an area that ultimately just may not be a strength.
Making promotions and compensation adjustments — It’s imperative to tightly link promotions and compensation adjustments to the objective results that come out of the performance review process. Managers should be given discretion to recommend promotions and compensation adjustments based on performance review results, and the company should incorporate within its culture an ethos that promotions and/or compensation increases are uniquely “performance” or merit based.
Define the next six months — Be sure to finish the performance review process with a clear roadmap for the next six months. What are the near term goals that will be the “results” measures for the employee’s next performance review? What specific accomplishments does the employee want to make in terms of their long-term professional and personal aspirations? And finally, what specific initiatives will be prioritized to achieve both these near term and long-term objectives that the manager and employee can partner around over the coming weeks and months?
Finally, a few last points on performance reviews. Be flexible and willing to adapt your performance review process to changing times. I’ve recently done that with how I am thinking about how we might weave our performance review process into our “One Team, Two Goals” focus.
Like any great product, the performance review process should evolve and iterate. Things change in the world around us. People have personal challenges along the way, and new perspectives come into the company that help shape how we might improve our current performance review process. The most important thing when it comes to doing performance reviews at your company is to commit the time and effort to do them on a consistent basis. Performance reviews are most impactful longitudinally, not in the context of doing them once or twice. Thus, applying — and slightly tweaking — Nike’s famous tagline to performance reviews: “Just Do Them…Consistently”.
Originally published on Medium on July 1, 2018. This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.