Andrew Rondeau

Andrew is the owner of this website and has been a Leader, Manager, Coach and Consultant for the last twenty-five years.

Here Is A Quick Way To Improve Your Performance Review

By Andrew Rondeau
Published 02/20/2008

A good Performance Review is a great opportunity if done correctly, to motivate your staff. If it is not motivating them, then both you and they are missing out. To motivate your staff you need to give an accurate review of their strengths and weaknesses, recognising their value to the organisation, as well as their shortcomings.

Communicate and Document

As a Manager, you will have to deal with certain difficult staff issues such as punctuality, sickness, motivation, deliveries etc. If after addressing these with the employee they continue to perform badly, it is important that you keep these documented along with any actions taken to correct them.

Remember, if you don’t tell staff of their behaviour and performance, either bad or good, they can be unaware of it and therefore either not improve or not maintain it.

Regularity Helps Improve The Review

Performance Reviews are usually conducted annually, as they are used to decide upon bonuses and salary increases for staff. However as they should be used to develop and expand upon the employees former Reviews, it would be better to hold them more regularly, for instance every 4 to 6 months.

Feedback from Reviews benefit the staff in a positive way, allowing expectations and goals to be set, weak and strong areas to be identified and the employee to gain the coaching and mentoring that they need to improve. The employees performance and not personality needs to be measured.

Measures

The Reviews need to relate to the employees Job Descriptions, which should show Key Performance Areas for the job which they carry out. These Areas should be as measurable as possible in order to determine whether the employee is carrying out the job properly. An example of these Areas are number of customer complaints and compliments, but you must remember that you do have to keep accurate records of all of these.

Performance Review forms for every employee need to be set up, listing all necessary Key Performance Areas relevant for their job. You should also have a matrix drawn up, for the recording of performance in each area, for instance Poor, Satisfactory, Good, Very Good and Excellent.

And a final word.

When assessing a member of staff, it is important that as far as possible they agree with their Assessment. If they are happy with what has been said, they are more likely to try and improve on their areas of weakness and maintain their areas of strength!