Pointing at every typical performance flaws, criticizing weakness or holding the team member responsible for small mistakes should never be a part of your employee performance review. An appraisal system is not meant to penalize the poor performers. Rather than being a big source of disappointment, you can try to turn this system into a great learning curve for both the outstanding and average performers.
Employee Performance Review Tips to Improve Learning
1. Focus on Constructive Feedback, Not Negative Feedback
Instead of simply criticizing the wrong doings, when you try to help your employees improve on their past weaknesses through your advice, it’s called constructive feedback. Your feedback provided during performance review should be encouraging enough to bring out the best of a human resource. Don’t push your ideology on the employees. Let them explore their latent talents. It’s you who should help them understand how proficient they’re and scope of improvements.
2. Don’t Drag the Past Issues. Get Over It
If you ever had a not so pleasant experience with an employee, don’t’ bring the issue during the performance assessment session. You’ve to get over the personal conflicts to be able to identify the pure talent. A bad moment can be driven by an unfavorable situation.
A performance evaluation criteria must be impartial and free from your personal judgements. This is the only way through which you can be fair with your subordinates and let them know that they have been evaluated solely based on their skills, productivity and initiatives. They must know that nothing but their performance and skills matter to the organization.
3. Clear Communication: Use of Words are Preferred Over Use of Numbers
Try to speak in a clear and comforting way during the assessment. We don’t advocate the number based review system. We think it doesn’t convey the right message. If someone is getting 3 out of 5, there has to be a logical explanation to this. It’s important that your subordinate understands what you’re after. The understanding you develop with your employee will help him/her identify the flaws and learn to improve on the performance deficiencies.
4. Develop a Bond of Trust Through Performance Review
Learning needs motivation. You can’t encourage your employees to learn from their mistakes until you help them develop trust in you. Your performance evaluation might not sound too promising to an employee, but it should at least be a clear representation of your goal, his/her achievements, the gap between the two aspects and the reasons for that. Make performance evaluation a one to one process. Don’t make the weakness or mistakes of a staff public.
Build A Creative Evaluation Process
The way you design the assessment system is going to have a huge effect on the people you select for your business division. Don’t give up on an employee so easily. Employee recruitment is an extremely time consuming process. Make the performance evaluation method a fun and creative approach. You should make sure the employees get your ideas and the goal expectations. To make the employee performance review a less sufferable process for the learning goal oriented employees, keep it simple and an ongoing process.
Additional related materials are available on Employee performance improvement plan page.
