Why Focal Reviews are Better Than Anniversary Reviews

by STANLEY JANAS, CHRP | Dec 16th, 2008 | Performance Management |

If you’re a manager or HR prime whose company does focal reviews, also known as calendar or fixed date reviews, chances are you’re just winding down or getting ready to start up your annual performance appraisal process. The first and fourth quarters of the year are the two most popular times for conducting employee performance reviews.

If you’re tearing your hair out wishing you could spread the work out over the year instead of having to do it all at once, you’re not alone. When faced with having to complete employee evaluation forms for all your employees, and schedule review meetings within a short span of time, it’s common to think that an anniversary-based process might be more sane.

But actually, in the long run, focal reviews are much more popular than anniversary-based reviews, because they offer a lot of significant advantages.

If you’re in HR, focal reviews are much easier to administer. You setup your process and forms at the start of the process, then go!  You never have to worry about adjusting the process or making a change in a form that will make reviews unfair to some employees. You can also start using the employee performance data you collect as soon as your process is complete, rather than having to wait a full year to get the whole picture. That’s important if you’re using performance data to drive other talent management processes like compensation or succession planning. Another advantage of focal processes is that your on-time completion rates tend to be higher.

Another big benefit of a focal review process is that it’s easier for managers to compare employees’ performance. It’s easier to decide on a rating for “John” when you can compare his performance and rating to “Tom’s”. Reviews and ratings tend to be fairer and more consistent.

Both methods have their advantages and drawbacks. But more and more, we’re seeing people switch to focal reviews so they can reap their numerous benefits.

If you’re interested in the topic or wrestling with deciding which process is best for you, read our reference article: Which is Best? Anniversary vs. Focal (Common Date) Performance Reviews.

I’d love to hear you thoughts on the subject. What works best for your organization and why? Any good stories to share?

  • Mark L.

    Trust a HR professional to think about whats best for HR first.

    Instead, if you start thinking about the employee first, I think you will find that the other problems are not hard to overcome. There are tools that mitigate the issue of “rolling administration” and “relative ranking”.

    -mark