
6 steps to enhance your employee review process
Reading time: about 8 min
Posted by: Lucid Content Team
What is the employee review process?
The employee review process should address concerns and feedback and offer both short and long-term goals. The review process can help to determine salary adjustments, track whether or not progress was made, and address problems.
Whether you’re a manager or one of your organization’s sterling HR representatives, you’re probably more anxious about the annual employee performance review process than your employees are. In fact, managers spend 210 hours a year on performance review process best practices.
What many managers sometimes fail to realize is that the employee review process doesn’t have to be the stereotypical typified, stale, and potentially awkward (or difficult) conversation that it has typically been. We’ve created an actionable list of the best practices so that both you and your direct reports can maximize the time spent on reviews and better manage and motivate your talent.
Benefits of employee reviews
Employee reviews are more than just a once-a-year meeting to go over an individual's performance. There are advantages to these annual reviews that will impact your team members long after the meeting is over:
- Improved communication
- Employee engagement
- Professional development
- Skills growth
Steps in the employee review process
1. Determine which type of performance review process your company should use
Management should create a safe space for direct reports to have conversations with managers—as opposed to an authority-driven space where a manager just tells each employee where they’re failing and why. Businesses should get into the habit of coaching their direct reports instead of disciplining them, and they might also want to think about implementing a management feedback system to balance the scales and better facilitate feedback between employees and managers.
Let’s look at the different review processes you can do to achieve this.
Types of employee review processes
Top-down
This approach is typically what you would envision for a standard employee performance review. A top-down review involves a supervisor formally meeting with the supervisee to discuss mistakes and insights and provide constructive feedback.
The goal is to open communication between employees and supervisors to review past performance and plan for future professional development. But a major critique of the top-down approach is that it can cause employees anxiety and hinder open communication because it is centered around an unbalanced relationship between managers and employees.
Self-evaluation
Just as the name suggests, self-evaluations involve employees reviewing their performance both with qualitative and quantitative measurements. This approach grants employees more ownership in the process, giving them the opportunity to reflect on their work and providing managers with valuable insights from the employee's perspective.
However, self-assessments often lack objectivity and skew the employee perspective, which can easily lead to conflict and employee resentment.
360-degree
Also known as the multi-rater feedback or multi-source feedback, the 360-degree approach aims to provide a comprehensive employee assessment. It incorporates feedback from numerous parties, including peers, direct reports, non-direct supervisors, and even the employees themselves. While the 360-degree feedback process offers more robust and constructive feedback, it can also overwhelm employees and require more time to process all of the information.
Ratings
A performance rating evaluation uses a scale or grading system usually customized for your organization to measure employee's performance. A key benefit of a performance evaluation rating scale is that it provides quantifiable data and can easily show trends over time. However, most rating systems often lack nuance and tend to skew nice rather than accurate.