I'm Candice Elliot and I am a human resources strategist and today we are going to be talking about performance reviews, the formal kind of performance reviews. Just to talk generally about performance reviews, I know that they're really tricky to coordinate, to keep a calendar for and to execute. However, if you're able to set up a performance review schedule and have reviews on a regular basis, I have seen it be such a benefit to companies and to employees. It helps to provide open lines of communication.
It gives people the time to talk about their challenges and their achievements and their goals and their dreams. It gives the company time to provide any employee department specific feedback on things. The method that I generally use is to have a self-evaluation first. This is given to the employee so that they can spend time thinking about the period that they're being reviewed for.
Generally, companies will review on an annual basis. Early in employment, some companies decide to do a three-month or a six-month review. I've found those to be especially helpful for companies that are able to execute them on a regular basis, that have that capacity [00:02:00] to do a six-month and then to have an annual after that has been a really positive method, I've seen, for both the manager and the employee.
It starts with the self-evaluation and the evaluation asks things like, what are the projects that you've worked on in the past year? What are the things that you're most proud of? What are the things that have been the most challenging for you? Give us feedback on management style and a variety of different things. I'll put a template in here so that you can access it. I give them two weeks to complete this evaluation.
You want to make sure that not a lot of time elapses from when they complete the evaluation to when you actually meet with them. The more time passes, the less relevant the information is in the evaluation that they filled out. It's surprising how much things can change in say a month. You should give the employee a date by which they would return the review to you. Then you would read that ahead of time before you get to the review where you're talking with them.
In a rush, had to read them right before going into a review or at the beginning of review, and that is not ideal. The best thing to do is really to set aside time, to read it, to digest that information, to reflect on it, to come up with the most appropriate responses or the most encouraging responses depending on the situation so that you can know how the conversation will go [00:04:00] in the review.
Now, prior to actually going into that meeting, you also want to have some idea about any changes that will be happening to benefits or compensation or any of those things or potentially promotion if that's on the table. If there are changes that will be happening to any of those things, then you want to be able to communicate that in their review. If someone's getting a raise or if they're being promoted or if they now qualify for some benefits that they didn't qualify for before, then you would want to share that information in the review.
Now, actually in the meeting, I typically ask the employee to give me a summary of their evaluation of themselves and to tell me-- I'll say, "I've read your evaluation but I would like to hear from you how you review yourself and why you believe these things to be true about you," and then enter into a conversation about their work. It can turn into a really difficult conversation.
If there are challenges, it can turn into a really friendly conversation. There's lots of things that can happen in reviews, and it's good to be prepared for the unexpected because sometimes people will decide to bring things forward in a review that you could never have imagined or planned for. Well, that's not true. We plan for the unexpected.
I'm going to be telling you more about that later, but just all kinds of things can come up. Be prepared yourself for going into the review and that maybe something could happen and just be ready [00:06:00] to respond to that if that does happen. That's helpful information for you if you're about to embark on the journey of doing performance evaluations. I will have a template evaluation form available for you and I hope that helps you.
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