What Managers Need to Manage Performance Year Round December 9th, 2008

Sean Conrad

Though not everyone will agree with Sam Culbert’s article in the Wall Street Journal on employee performance reviews, I think it makes some good points. The old way of giving employees feedback once a year in a rather arbitrary, top-down way just isn’t effective. And annual performance appraisal conversations can be skewed by our motivations.

I think he’s absolutely right when he calls for two-sided, reciprocally accountable performance previews.

Good managers don’t limit themselves to a once a year discussion with their employees that is primarily “backward looking”. They develop a relationship with each of their employees and foster an ongoing conversation about performance that includes direction and feedback. The conversations need to be “forward looking”, focused on ongoing employee development and career growth.

I think there are some best-practices that both managers and HR can use to help transform the performance appraisal process into an ongoing practice that is helpful and useful for everyone.

First of all, managers need to see their primary responsibility as managing people, and doing that on an ongoing basis. Someone I used to work with described managing as “learning to work through people, not doing the work yourself”.

One of the things managers can do to help their employees is monitor their progress on goals year round. Here, I think it goes without saying that employee goals need to be linked to organizational goals to give them context and meaning. Throughout the year, managers should be asking for updates, monitoring performance on goals, watching results and anticipating challenges. That way they can intervene early on if things start to go off the rails. If you’re committed to your employees’ success, why would you wait until they’d failed to provide them help?

Another helpful thing managers should be doing is providing coaching, feedback and development opportunities on an ongoing basis. Again, the goal is to support an employee’s performance and development and ensure their success. Look at, and assess an employee’s performance, let them know specifically what is expected, give them suggestions for things they can improve and give them resources to help learn how to improve their performance. This can take the form of training courses, but also include job shadowing, mentoring, reading, volunteer activities, etc. Anything that helps the employee further develop the skills and competencies they need.

Managers also need to keep notes, all year round, on what their employee are doing, what successes and challenges they faced, and what the manager did to help. These notes should form the basis of the performance review. You just can’t remember things that happened a year ago in enough detail without these.

From an HR perspective, HR can help managers provide employees with the ongoing feedback and direction they need by designing a performance appraisal process that supports and encourages this.

If you consider the idea of the performance preview, it is not a bad idea.  It could be formal with an actual process that is triggered automatically or a more informal discussion about progress and expectations.  Think of it as a “mini review” that can be monthly or quarterly serves to set the expectation that performance is a day-to-day priority.  Not to mention, it encourages more frequent dialogue about performance instead of getting together once a year to rehash things.

HR can also send reminders to managers and employees so they don’t forget to do all these important things. Reminders help keep us all on track.

But I think the most important thing HR can do to support ongoing performance management is to provide managers and employees with effective tools for doing the job. If HR makes it easy for managers with online journals, a library of coaching tips for competencies, easy access to learning and development resources, and a simple to use application so they can access and record all of this from a central location, managers are far more likely to give employees the direction and support they need.

I don’t think any manager wants to do a bad job of performance management. I think sometimes their organizations don’t give them enough support to do a great job.

We’ve got a reference article on the Best Practices for Managing Performance Year Round if you’d like to read more.

What do you think? Is there anything else managers or HR should be doing?

Tags: employee evaluations, employee performance appraisal, employee performance reviews, goal management, performance management