HR From Anywhere: Reviewing Employee Performance

Employee performance reviews are something that staff and management teams often dread. They can cause a lot of anxiety for both parties and be seen as somewhat negative, which can mean that the overall review makes everyone feel somewhat deflated. However, they don’t need to be seen this way, and during periods where you may have staff working from home, or be planning to welcome people back from furlough, they can help engage your employees, promote wellbeing, enhance relationships between managers, employees and the wider team and also help you review company goals and objectives.

Having an online, cloud-based and secure performance management system to work alongside your other HR processes can really enhance your people management, especially during periods of long-term remote working. However, you have to ensure you have the right features in your cloud HR solution to ensure that your reviews can benefit your manager and employees.

Employee self-assessment with Manager appraisal

This is the ability for the manager to ask for feedback from the employee via questions around strengths and weaknesses, or how they are feeling about certain projects or progress their making. The employee can add their responses to this with the manager being able to comment, before or after the review. This helps the review to become much more of a conversation with input from both sides. From a managerial perspective, you get more insight into where your employees might be struggling, what they’re enjoying and also where they want their future career with the company to go. If you can get a general feel for any successes they feel particularly proud of or stuck points, you can work with them to encourage them into the next steps in their career, or even provide them with any training they might need or want.

360 feedback

This comprises asking your employees colleagues or even external customers or may suppliers that they work with for review feedback on your member of staff, allowing you to see the full picture of how your employee is working. This is arguably a fairer way of assessing your staff member and therefore benefits your employee by allowing you to get feedback from how they work with other colleagues and collaborators. The positive feedback received can also provide your employee with a boost in confidence at working with other individuals, in turn this could also help you as a manager, should you require your employee to work independently more often. Taking this approach can also further engage other members of staff in the review process, which can be a key indicator within your HR strategy, as it makes it clear that your organisation is interested in the views of the staff and wants to hear from everyone.

Shout-outs

These allow you to use your online tool to show your appreciation for work your team has done with a public “shout-out”, but it’s also really good if you can remind your employee of these during their regular review too just to bring more positive feedback to the process. Employee appreciation is key to ensuring your employees feel valued in your business. By letting them know they're appreciated, research has shown they're more likely to stay employed with you for the long-term and even perform their job even better. Appreciation is the key to truly engaged employees, meaning you can get a higher level of performance out of them, all contributing to a happy workforce and an increase in business performance and end the review on a high note!

Objectives & Key Results

Using company objectives and key results to track progress and ensure that your staff members are aligned with your company goals, is another feature you may wish to have in your process, as essentially reviews against goals allows you to see where changes need to be made to certain objectives, this could be personal, team or company objectives. It can be really beneficial to use your employee performance reviews to measure how employees are performing against their objectives, which, if you use OKRs, should be in line with your company goals. This can help you to see where areas of focus are needed to reach the objectives. You can also see what new goals you need to set based on the outcomes of the previous goals. This can be very useful in terms of future planning for the company as a whole but also allows your employees to see where they fit into the bigger picture, allowing them to feel engaged and valuable to the organisation. To find out more about OKRs check out our other blog.

Customisable Templates

Being able to use templates for consistency within the organisation is another key feature of online performance reviews, or any other kind of probationary review or disciplinary review, but they should also be customizable so they can be utilised in your business & for any review type. A key positive of having employee performance review templates is allowing for a consistent process for performance reviews throughout your company which ensures each team is following the same guidelines for each different type of review. This could be seen as particularly important if the review is disciplinary to ensure it is always fair to each employee. It's also more likely that if managers have a template to follow that the review will actually be much more productive, with the prep work to be done before the review in an easy to follow format as well as negating the need for team managers to pick the type of review, if they're conducting a performance review, for example.

Being able to utilise the same software solution for each kind of review allows you to keep all of this in one place, making it easy to find older reviews if you wish to refer back, or simply ensure you have an audit trail should you require this for any reason.

In app end to end reviews

This essentially means that all of your performance reviews are located in one place and each part of the performance review process is also enclosed in that area. So all the points mentioned above, such as the employees comments, 360 feedback, shout-outs and reviews against goals, are collated in one area so you can refer back to anything you need to at your convenience. For any disciplinary reviews, or any other kind of review, this is also stored here too making it a very useful area of your solution.

The Appogee HR advanced performance management module is available as part of Appogee HR Success. To find out more about how to run online performance reviews, you can try us for free for 14 days or request a personalised demo.