Beginners Guide to Employee Performance Reviews  

If you supervise employees, the question of employee performance reviews always comes up sooner or later. Performance management is about ensuring your staff are doing the best that they can, in the most efficient way possible and working out ways you can help improve the effectiveness. By setting up a clear system that everyone understands and follows, you increase your ability to manage performance – both good and bad.

What makes up an effective performance management system for businesses? All performance management systems are made up of 4 basic parts – everything else is just window dressing:

• Setting clear goals or targets
• Performing the work
• Checking how the work went against the goals or targets
• Setting new goals or targets

 So, how do you set clear goals and targets?  Well, the how-to’s of actually writing goals and targets are the subject of other articles – but the basics of any effective goal or target are having clear and shared understanding of:

• What has to be done
• How is it to be done (which includes information, resources or riding instructions)
• How do you know that it has been done successfully?

You can develop clear and shared understanding through discussions or through formal written documents - the level of formality depends on your individual company and the relationships you have with your staff.

Performing the work stage of the cycle is fairly self explanatory, you get out of the way and let the actual work be performed, providing regular and ongoing feedback to help keep the employee on track. It is much like a test and measure advertising campaign – checking what is working and then adjusting as you go to get the absolute best out of the campaign.

Finally, the rule for the review process should always be “No new information”. There should be absolutely no surprises to employees if you have provided feedback correctly during the “doing” stage of the process. At the review you review how things went and then start the whole cycle again.  Reviews can be held every 6 or 12 months, depending on your individual company and the needs of your projects or tasks.

Performance Management of your staff does not have to be a “big deal” – it just needs to be regular, ongoing and understood.

Ingrid Cliff is a Human Resources Writer who is the author of Instant HR Policies and Procedures and Employee Performance Reviews: Tips, Templates & Tactics.