Employee performance reviews are vital if you want to maintain productivity in your business. They are your opportunity to raise any issues with an employee’s work and come up with solutions that will help them to work more effectively. A review also gives the employee a chance to raise any problems that might be affecting their ability to work, so you can remove those hurdles and help them to be as productive as possible. However, a lot of businesses get their review process wrong and they don’t really get much out of it. It’s important that you ask the right questions in a review and you come out of it with a clear idea of what you need to do to boost productivity around the office. If you don’t feel that your employee performance reviews are very effective, here are a few simple ways that you can get more out of them.
A Regular Review Cycle
If you’re going to get meaningful results from your performance reviews, you need to give employees clear direction and then follow up to see if they have taken action based on your discussion. That means you need to have a regular review cycle so you can track progress, but a lot of businesses only conduct reviews once a year. That isn’t regular enough and you’ll see more results if you have a review once every 6 months at least, but preferably more often.
Use Performance Management Software
When you go into a performance review, you should have a list of points to discuss. That includes some positives about the employee’s performance and some areas where they can improve. But often, bosses don’t really know what to discuss because they don’t have a clear picture of how that employee is performing. You can build that clear picture by using performance management software to track their output at work. If you calculate the ROI of performance management software, you’ll find that, although it is an extra expense, it will more than pay for itself because it will help to increase productivity a lot. You will have a lot more information going into a performance review, which means that you can have a more meaningful discussion that is likely to give tangible results in terms of productivity and performance. Without that direction, your performance reviews are a waste of time.
Set Clear Expectations
At the end of a performance review, you need to make sure that you’re leaving employees with clear expectations. You can’t just be vague and say that they need to be more productive, you need to set out exactly which areas they need to improve in and how. Most importantly, you need to give them specific targets and goals to meet over a set timeline. This is particularly important for flexible workers that aren’t always in the office. The only way to see an improvement in your employees after a performance review is to give them a clear path moving forward.
Performance reviews can have a huge positive impact on productivity in your business, but only if you conduct them in the right way.
