Employee Reviews - Plan and Prepare for Better Results

Creating Success in Employee Review Communication

Taking the time to adequately prepare for performance conversations is critical in showing your employees you are willing to meet them where they are and understand their particular situation. Here are some tips for how to prepare for successful performance conversations:

The Power of Observation in Employee Reviews

Not only do you want to understand the nature of concerning behaviors from your employee, but you also want to assess the frequency and gravity of the behavior. By learning how often the behavior is occurring and how serious the impact of the behavior is on your employee’s performance or the larger team, you can determine when and how to address the concern. Oftentimes, leaders want to address performance issues sooner rather than later, but leaders need to ask themselves if they are addressing these issues for the right reasons.

Let’s say you have an employee who is late to work once every few weeks for a couple of minutes. Should you monitor the situation to determine if it will resolve itself or address this issue immediately? What is the impact that this attendance issue is having on the employee’s performance or on the morale of the team? These are the questions that leaders should evaluate when they first become aware of a concern with employee performance or behavior. If this continues for an extended period of time, worsens, or has an impact on performance or other factors or employees, you may decide to address it sooner rather than later.

Document and Assess

Take notes or gather supporting documentation for what you are seeing. When used the right way, concrete examples and irrefutable evidence can help you to stay on the same page as your employee. Be careful, however, not to let this go on too long. Having a laundry list of a multitude of examples over an extended period of time can be overwhelming for an employee and create frustration. The longer poor performance and behavior is tolerated without being addressed, the more justified an employee will feel in continuing that behavior.

How to document and organize your notes

While there’s no shortage of performance plan templates online, the good ones are clean and simple – often in a grid format.

As you are documenting, assess your observations to determine when best to address the situation. While you don’t want to wait too long and have too much to address, you also want to have enough information to have a meaningful conversation about the performance or behavior you are seeing.

Take a Pause

Ask yourself if you are rushing and making assumptions before you schedule time to meet with the employee, and:

Are there any other factors within or outside of your control as a leader that could be contributing to the performance or behavior you are seeing? Take a moment to ensure that you are confident in addressing these concerns with your employee and that you have all the tools and documentation necessary.
Along with your observations, it can be helpful to have any relevant company policies on hand including the employee’s job description.

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