Establish a Long-Term Schedule

You should begin by establishing a schedule for your organization’s performance appraisals, outlining the frequency and timing of employee reviews. This not only helps you create a rhythm for effectively gauging employee performance, but ensures regular and predictable access to productivity/performance data that can inform workforce decision-making. Although some organizations conduct appraisals every 18 months, most organizations invested in comprehensive performance management conduct performance appraisals every six to 12 months.

Choose the Best HR Appraisal Method(s) for Your Organization

From graphic rating scales to behaviorally anchored rating scales, ranking method, and comparative performance evaluation, there are a number of performance review methods employers use to evaluate employee performance. Remember that each organization is idiosyncratic in terms of workforce, ideal methods of evaluation, and when to use quantitative vs. qualitative approaches. It’s important to tailor the appraisal methods to suit your organization’s workflow. Methods should align with how competencies and goals are tracked to ensure that the process feels both fair and effective for employees. With this in mind, we recommend considering any of these major methods:

• Self-Assessment – This method encourages employees to articulate their strengths, review past accomplishments, identify areas for potential improvement, and begin considering how to align their career goals with organizational objectives. Self-assessment is most useful when paired with a method like 360-degree feedback or MBO – combining objective and subjective approaches.

• Management by Objectives (MBO) – Using this method, employee performance is evaluated periodically relative to agreed-upon/measurable goals that were established at the prior meeting or in advance. These objectives can be set and reviewed quarterly or twice a year, depending on your organization’s preferred strategy. The MBO method is helpful for ensuring consistent accountability and alignment between an individual’s career goals and the overriding goals of the organization.

• Competency and Goal-Based Appraisals – This method evaluates employees based on predefined competencies (such as skills and behaviors) and measurable goals. It ensures alignment between individual performance and the organization’s objectives, focusing on areas like skill development and achieving SMART goals that drive employee growth and organizational success.
  
  

  
  Provide Training for Performance Reviews

  Once your organization has chosen a long-term schedule and methodology for performance appraisals, it’s important to provide training to managers and supervisors, including how to apply the appraisal methods, provide constructive feedback, address performance issues tactfully, avoid bias (recency bias and other forms), and formulate a development plan and SMART goals with employees.

  
  Communicate Expectations to Employees Pre-Appraisal

  To model transparency and reduce employee anxiety about the performance appraisal process, it’s helpful to communicate expectations to employees well before any meetings occur. For example, you might communicate which appraisal methods will be used, or solicit employee self-assessment by providing forms prior to the meeting. Consider taking all of the following steps:

  • Provide the basic format/structure of the appraisal process in advance
  • Explain that in addition to standard performance feedback, employees will also have an opportunity to provide feedback of their own
  • Emphasize that each appraisal will focus on providing resources, outlining new career opportunities, and aligning individual and organizational goals. 

  Demystifying performance appraisals before they occur not only increases the likelihood that employees will be more prepared and open during the process. It also keeps the focus on constructive conversation, future opportunities, and deepening collaboration and understanding across your entire organization. 

   

• Begin by reviewing what will be covered and explored during the meeting and emphasize that the appraisal process is meant to be collaborative, productive, and informative for both sides
• Review the employee’s past performance, recent performance, and any noteworthy achievements
• Discuss the employee’s strengths and potential areas for improvement
• Use objective data and a range of feedback to inform discussion in previous steps
• Provide an opportunity for the employee to share feedback re: management, supervision, workflow, or organizational practices that apply to their position
• Set SMART goals and craft an individualized development plan with the employee (including short-, mid- and long-term goals that align with the employee’s career aspirations and the organization’s goals).
• Take first steps towards providing the employee access to necessary resources (training, continuing education, technology, or establishing follow-up meetings/protocols) and plan for follow-up meetings and progress monitoring.

Reference Relevant Data

When you leverage data in a performance appraisal meeting, it’s best not to rely exclusively on memory or personal experience. Whether an employee’s job performance is praised or constructively criticized (or both), you should use objective data and/or feedback from fair sources to launch a discussion about performance. Objective data might include sources like sales figures, feedback from clients, project deliverables, self-assessment text, or assessment data from peers or supervisors. If issues or problem areas need to be discussed in the course of the appraisal, it’s better to pinpoint specific recurring errors or quantifiable moments of underperformance to make critiques feel less pointed and more focused on objective, verifiable concerns.

Set Clear Objectives

Ensure that you help each employee concretely articulate SMART goals in their development plan. To incrementally gauge success with these SMART goals at a later date, you might need to employ a mixture of qualitative and quantitative approaches. For instance, some achievements will be easy to track numerically (percentage increases in completed projects, online inquiries, or social media traffic) while others will rely on more quantitative data (more positive feedback from clients and peers, for example).

Depending on the responsibilities and nuances of a particular position, you should work to determine key objectives and key results that can be tracked, measured, and evaluated periodically and then assessed more broadly in the next performance appraisal. Finally, if reaching certain performance goals or metrics will lead to a change in compensation or a promotion, the terms of this should be clearly and directly addressed during the performance appraisal.

Collect Feedback and Establish Follow-Up Expectations

Whether it’s midway through the performance appraisal, towards the end, or naturally in the course of conversation, it’s important to invite feedback from the employee. Supervisors can use this opportunity to more deeply understand the employee’s perspective and the organization can synthesize and leverage collected employee feedback to improve or hone internal processes (workflow, project management, etc.).

One common pitfall of the performance appraisal process is inadequate follow-up, so it’s vital to communicate to each employee how progress will be periodically assessed, how often follow-up meetings will occur, and how to ask questions, provide feedback, or access resources as needed while taking any steps outlined in the employee development plan. If any new technology will be used to facilitate follow-up steps, training modules should be immediately accessible to employees so they can quickly utilize any new platform.