Performance Reviews can be as specific, unique, and different from one job title to another, between departments, and depending on the employer.
There is no fixed rule on what a performance review should include, but there are some general rules that can be good to follow in order to optimize their use for the employer and employee alike.
Performance Period
The performance period is the entire period that the employee’s performance is being reviewed for.
The performance period is generally always the same within an employer, and can range from being an entire year, a quarter, or even less.
The performance period yields one performance review, however there can be several performance evaluations that occur during the performance period, all depending on business and individual needs.
Different Performance Evaluations
A performance review isn’t necessarily just a single evaluation, but several evaluations and documents that all intertwine and together create the performance review.
The attached document shows a general performance evaluation setup that in of itself isn’t useful. It will need tweaks in order to be useful for it’s purpose, and said tweaks are entirely up to the documents intended purpose which can be different depending on the employer, department, job title, and even purpose of the evaluation.
Several different performance evaluations that can be conducted are for example:
- Interview performance evaluation
- Knowing the performance criteria for the job the applicant is being interviewed for and evaluated accordingly. This can show indications on if the employee will be fitting for the job or not.
- This initial performance evaluation can then either be discarded, or used as a basis for later performance evaluations.
- This is useful to identify applicants’ possible strengths and weaknesses so later evaluations have a baseline to work from.
- Gives the employee a baseline to operate from when they start working, knowing what criteria they were hired from, and what criteria the interview process identified as possible weaknesses.
- Performance evaluation at the end of probation period
- After a week, two weeks, 30 days, 90 days, or even all of the mentioned periods – and even more – all depending on business needs.
- Can be based on the interview performance evaluation, ensuring the probation period is justly evaluated based on the strengths and weaknesses identified before the employee began working and how the employee has managed to utilize them/grow during the probation period.
- Results give an indication of next steps after the probation period.
- Periodic performance evaluation
- Weekly, biweekly, monthly, or quarterly.
- When an employee is working towards a specific professional goal, or even has received a reprimand, sitting down with the employee and deciding upon an action plan helps the employee and employer to keep the situation focused on actual performance and not personal feelings or ideas.
- Periodic performance evaluations can be set up to support the employee with their action plan, both to keep them working towards their goals as well as to make sure that key objectives and deadlines are being reached.
- Setting up periodic performance evaluations requires a fixed performance evaluations schedule and action plan that the employee can follow.
- 360 performance evaluations
- A good comprehensive way to see how the employee is doing from all possible sites.
- Performance evaluations are created for subordinates, peers, supervisors, HR team, and even the employee themselves to go through.
- Needs thorough planning and creation of self explanatory and easy to use performance reviews that are general enough to be applicable to all.
- Differences need to be made on whether it is a subordinate, peer, supervisor, or the employee themself that is doing the review.
- Self performance evaluation
- These evaluations allow the employee to list how they feel they are doing, as well as what they feel they need to improve and what they need in order to improve it.
- Gives the employee a sense of ownership over their performance review.
- Data collected
- The performance review isn’t just put together by information gathered by employees and other individuals during evaluations.
- Sometimes the necessary data can be gathered using metrics that are gathered by the employer from sources such as:
- Time management systems
- Payroll systems
- Other applicable HR systems
- Sales systems
- Project management systems
- Audits
- etc.
- Understanding how the business is run, setting up continuous metrics that are useful for audits as well as performance reviews is easy.
- Etc.
Please note that the above list is not exhaustible, and the performance review can be setup in anyway that is best fitting for business’ needs.
The one thing the use of different evaluations needs, is to be held in check, so that the same setup and criteria is used for all with only job specific variations to maintain fairness.
Document header
What is included in the performance reviews’ header should be the one constant between all the different performance evaluation documents that each employer creates.
The header can include some (or all) of the following:
- Necessary employee info:
- Name
- ID
- Initial date of hire
- Necessary job information:
- Department
- Job title
- Date the employee was promoted to that particular job
- Nearest supervisor
- Necessary information about the performance review:
- Date that particular review is done
- Name of reviewer
- Reviewer’s job title
- Reviewer’s relationship with the employee (job title wise, and/or personally if applicable).
As performance reviews are a living process that can be audited and changed from one year to the next, making sure that the header is applicable between years, between different types of evaluations, and even for all performance review addendums, is important.
Evaluation
How the evaluation is done is also entirely up to business needs, but as always:
Evaluations should be compatible between all employees, except for job specific assessment and/or criteria.
In the attached document, four kinds of evaluation methods can be found:
- Rating on a scale
- Most often used for skills or competencies.
- Showing status
- Most often used for specific tasks or goals.
- By how much of a target the employee has reached
- Sometimes used to evaluate the employee’s capability in reaching business critical goals, or metrics related to audits.
- Often specific criteria or goals the employee is working towards.
With this there can be comments from the evaluator and even the employee to include further information and explanations on why certain criteria weren’t met, or were exceeded.
Assessment
What is assessed during the performance evaluation is – as always – dependent upon the employer, as well as the department and even job title the employee has.
The assessment can include for example:
- Job specific skills assessment
- Leadership skills assessment
- Personal skills assessment
- Soft skills assessment
- Technical skills assessment
- Audit assessment
- Behavioral assessments
- Competencies assessments
- Performance assessment
- Personal qualities assessment
- Skills assessment
- Task or objective assessment
- Etc.
What assessment is used and how many is depended upon the purpose of the evaluation. There can be several evaluations during a performance period, each evaluation with different assessments, or one that evaluates them all.
Please note that the above example is not exhaustive, nor are all assessments necessary as some include joint criteria and therefore render one another unnecessary.
Each assessment doesn’t even have to use the same evaluation method. There are no specific rules, what ever is necessary to properly cover all business needs in the performance review can be done.
Just remember to keep all performance evaluation compatible and fair.
Criteria
Each assessment that needs to be done, should be accompanied with all necessary criteria to evaluate said assessment.
For example, an assessment for personal qualities could include the following criteria:
- Demonstrates integrity
- Professionalism
- Punctuality
- Attendance
- Dress code adherence
- Etc.
How each criteria is then evaluated depends on the necessary data needed from each criteria.
Definitions
What assessments and criteria for each assessment are used is absolutely dependent upon business needs for each job title. However there are certain general rules that are important to keep in mind.
- KISS (Keep It Super Simple) – The assessments and criteria shouldn’t be so out of the box, far fetched, or complicated that each evaluation is different as each evaluator has a different interpretation for what their evaluating on.
- Use assessments and criteria from each job title’s job description, departmental needs, from applicable audits, or that are business critical.
- Transparency is key, assessments and their criteria should be know to employees from the get go.
- Keep definitions that explain what is being evaluated, why it’s being evaluated, and how it should be evaluated to maintain fairness and try to avoid any possible personal bias from the evaluators.
- Etc.
In order to properly set up assessments and criteria that are easy to use and understand by all it is important to maintain detailed definition of each criteria that employees are being evaluated upon.
The definition should readily explain why said criteria is part of the assessment, as well as why it’s important to the performance review, and the definition should also explain how said criteria is to be evaluated so that all evaluators reach the same results regardless of their personal feelings or understanding on the matter.
Definitions are key to KISS performance reviews, keep them transparent, and maintain fairness and void of all bias.
Cross your T’s and dot your I’s
At the end of the performance period, or evaluation if deemed necessary, the employee and an applicable evaluator, manager, or HR professional can then together with the employee decide upon goals and objectives the employee can work towards during the next performance period, and list what training or tools the employee needs to reach said goals and objectives.
This can either trigger periodic performance evaluations to keep the employee on track, or simply be milestones for the employee to reach during next performance period.
Results
Here the results are kept in a separate template, as results can be done after a performance evaluation, or after the performance period is over, it all depends on how the employer has their performance review set up. This does not mean the results need to be in a separate document, as always, it all depends on the employer’s setup of the performance review process.
The results can be used to determine next steps for the employee:
- The employee can be flagged as a possible gap-stopper, a high potential employee who is ready for a promotion should a position suddenly become open.
- The employee can even be flagged as a possible problem if their performance is getting worse from one performance period to the next, and HR should set an action plan in motion in order to find the cause and support the employee as needed.
- The results could also just include goals or objectives that the employee should work on during the next performance period, either for general professional growth or to better match the employee’s skill with their desired professional outcome.
- Or what ever other result the performance review yields!
What ever the results are, they are then used to further empower and strengthen the employee in their work, by setting up action plans to rectify issues or reach milestones quicker, goals and objectives to systematically reach certain professional milestones, and even as a source of information to base compensation and benefits on.