3 Ways to Improve your Performance Review Forms

When performance reviews are faulty, it is easy to recognize that change is necessary. Yet finding the solution may not prove to be so simple.

You might find yourself caught in a routine of trying every new strategy, but this can make things worse.

Safeguard yourself from this common mistake by improving your forms in 3 easy steps:

1. Keep Them Short

If you’re in HR you’re already dealing with a great deal of paperwork. Don’t over do it with ineffectual and tedious review forms. The key here is to balance the depth and frequency of the review process.

Deloitte has found that a large part of the review process is actually useless. When redesigning their performance management system, it was noticed that managers were being asked to answer an awful lot of questions about their employee’s abilities in different skill categories. Yet research has shown that people are horrible at rating skills, which means these sections of the review were probably generating meaningless data.

For example, these types of questions are almost always guaranteed on a review form: “How well does this employee live up to the company value of ‘Be Genuine’?” That is a well intentioned question but unfortunately it creates data that never gets used. In fact, that data should probably never be used because it is likely meaningless as well.

All of the questions that weren't serving the needs of their quantitative review were removed from Deloitte's form.

A Raise or Promotion?

During this overhaul, Deloitte wanted to develop a way to categorize employees when deciding upon their compensation or promotion.

The team looked at their current review process which involved extensive ranking discussions and a long review form. The form also involved many skill-focused questions, which again caused their current process to be overly inefficient when trying to recognize these two needs.

The original goal of the lengthy forms was to create a way of scoring and identifying employees. Once classified, the data would be used across the organization to make decisions about promotions and compensation. For Deloitte, the quantitative feedback gathered about their teams is particularly important because they do not use their structured reviews as a way to force team leaders into managing. Instead, managing the team is left up to the manager.

So how did they minimize their forms while maintaining the original intent? It brings us to our second tip. Ask easy questions.

2. Ask Easy Questions

Keep it simple and ask what you really want to know.

Don’t beat around the bush, try to be too clever, or do complex analysis of multiple questions. Chances are just asking one solid question will do. For example, I could ask you about the smokiness of the pepperonis on your pizza, the gooeyness of the cheese, and the crunch of the crust. Or I could just ask “did you like your pizza?”

One of Deloitte’s famous “simplifications” turned out to be their decision to ask managers if they want to have an employee on their team again. It seems quite feeble but their prior strategy was for managers to first rate employees on several characteristics, then analyze those answers and assign the employee a rating. Their old system was just a more complex method of reaching the same basic result.

Ask questions that can be answered.

Sounds too easy right? Indeed, but reviews are infamous for asking managers to score employees on things like impactfulness. How will your managers know what a “3” versus a “4” is in impactfulness? It is necessary to either give them an especially thorough training on how to answer your questions, or ask questions they already know how to answer.

You can ask the reviewer the following two questions in order to receive the same input/feedback: “Do you think the reviewee should be promoted to management?” or “Score the employee 1-9 on the following six qualities of a manager.” One is much easier to answer.

3. Focus On the Future

If you have a once-a-year process that emphasizes financial rewards and punishments, whether you mean to or not, your focus is holding people accountable for past behavior rather than improving current and future performance. Asking the right performance review questions at the right time is crucial.

Check-in.

Touching base with your employees on a regular basis makes reviews more of an ongoing process that shifts the focus forward. They can motivate and modify performance, adjust goals or recognize employees in actual time instead of reflectively.

Ask questions that look ahead.

Secondly, ask questions that invite the employee to look ahead. Rather than asking what their biggest strength is, you can ask which one of their personal strengths will be most important in the coming year. Another example is asking “what serves you the most while working on this project” instead of “are your strengths being maximized here?” As you can see, specific, engaging words leave no room for ambiguity.

Be present.

Lastly, make sure you are present. Don’t just review mechanically. In order to affect future behavior, you must work with your employees in real time. Uncommon, but truly effective questions such as these make a big impact; “Have you been given enough feedback to adequately work on this?” or “What feedback or training do you think would have better prepared you for this challenge?” Employees need to know that when all is said and done, their performance reviews are making a difference.