S4 E8: Redefining Performance Reviews for a New Era of Work
Podcast November 20, 2023
Transcript:
Pete Wright:
Welcome to Human Solutions, Simplifying HR for People who Love HR from AIM HR Solutions on True Story FM. I’m Pete Wright. And this week we’re talking all about reinventing employee evaluations in the wake of the global shift to remote work over the last few years. Forget what you thought you knew about performance reviews. We’re tearing down the old blueprints and questioning everything from the role of corporate culture to the nitty-gritty of rating scales. To do that, I’m joined by our own Kyle Pardo and Terry Cook, our own review experts here to help us understand modern performance measurement. Kyle Pardo, Terry Cook. I had a dream about this podcast last night.
Kyle Pardo:
Okay.
Terry Cook:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
And I hope it is… You may not think I dream about podcasts. I do them often enough that I should just be able to let this go. And yet, here I was showing up to this podcast and we were not recording the show, the three of us, we were showing up to a performance intervention and you two were reviewing me-
Terry Cook:
Oh.
Pete Wright:
… and it was peak anxiety for yours truly. I think I woke up at some point in the middle of the night completely anxious-
Terry Cook:
Oh my God.
Pete Wright:
… about performance reviews, and I sort of think that sets us up for this conversation. Can we talk, just before we get into the modern performance landscape, why is the review cycle so fraught? I can’t be alone, right?
Kyle Pardo:
You’re right, you’re right. It often causes anxiety, and if that’s the case, it probably means we haven’t done a good job of giving you feedback all along the way, right? Probably means we’ve couched some difficult conversations and maybe haven’t really let you know exactly what was expected of you or how you are doing towards those goals. So we hope that whenever there’s a performance conversation, it shouldn’t be a surprise. It should be very normal, very expected. But you’re right, I think people get nervous of it. It’s very often tied to your compensation, so people worry about what that is going to be. But just thinking of somebody filling out a form, putting check marks next to what you’ve been doing well or not is brings us back to our school days and anxiety.
Pete Wright:
Oh, it doesn’t have her. There’s another side of it too, which is from… I don’t think any of us who have been in HR at all are unfamiliar with the perils that come from being on the giving side of the review cycle. There’s anxiety there too, right, Terry?
Terry Cook:
There is. As Kyle mentioned, it’s about thinking about as you’re giving somebody a review, have you been good at communicating all year long? Have you clearly expressed your expectations of that person? Do they know what they’re doing because of what you’ve said? Or will they feel like all of this is coming at them as a complete surprise and they have no idea how they’re being measured?
So I think all of that, as Kyle already mentioned, is all part of it. And as you mentioned, Pete, even the giver has that kind of anxiety. They don’t know how the person might react if the person hasn’t really taken the constructive feedback or other feedback during the year. They don’t know how they may react during that review or what they might be looking for. So I think the anxiety goes both ways and I think it’s just a natural feeling when you know something is being written about you that will go in your file and become part of your record.
Pete Wright:
The file, the record are so daunting.
Kyle Pardo:
Yes, I know.
Pete Wright:
So daunting. So let’s talk then about what it is we’re looking for and looking at in terms of the today’s review culture. Does our employee assessment culture look the same today as it did even five years ago?
Kyle Pardo:
I don’t think it does. I think one of the words that we hear very frequently that infiltrates all areas of business is employee wellbeing, empathy… Phrases like that. And so I think what we’re seeing is a bit of a change in terms of what those evaluations might look like. So in years past, you might find something like a performance appraisal that evaluated you on a five point scale, and that might be something like exceeds expectations, meets expectations, needs improvement, a couple of other levels mixed in there.
There are some trends to change that might be maybe something that is mastery, achieved expectations, or not yet. So it goes almost again, back to school where you think of… We’re not saying that you’re a poor performer, we’re just saying you’re not quite there yet.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Kyle Pardo:
And as an employer maybe, “What can we do to help you get there?” So it’s a little bit of a softer approach than maybe what we’ve seen in the past.
Pete Wright:
It really does sound almost exactly like what my kids went through in their recent high school experience. Their grades are gone. It’s 1, 2, 3, 4. “Have you learned this thing or are you not there yet?” It seems to be a softer sell. It just feels different at work, right? You hire somebody expecting that competency to be there, right? At some level?
Terry Cook:
Yeah. That’s the hope, Pete. You hope that there is a certain level of understanding of what the job is and that the person understands what they need to do on a day-to-day basis. But I do think the other switch is that people expect us to have more of a dialogue with them. They want to be part of the conversation. They want to be part of the plan for their future with the company. They’re actually looking for more of that information than they may have in the past.
Some people would come to the review just to say, as Kyle said, “Which category am I getting the checkbox on?” And they’ll move forward as soon as they know what their increase is. But I think now people are looking at the review as, “I want to give my own feedback. I want to be part of a discussion. I also want to know what the company has plans for me.” So this is not just about you as a company talking to the employee and telling them what you might need from them. They want to be able to talk to you about what they need from you as well.
Pete Wright:
So it sounds like we’re getting to that culture of communication and we dropped culture before. What role does the company culture have in the review process or the review practice?
Kyle Pardo:
I think it’s really the foundation of the whole practice in terms of what type of core competencies are you evaluating the employee on, and… That could be an exhaustive list, but a company really needs to think about, “What’s most important to us? Are we going to evaluate employees on technical skills, on knowledge of our products, or is it more the cultural pieces, teamwork and punctuality and collaboration and communication and embracing really what we value in our company?” And so I think as their company is designing their review form and criteria, thinking about all of those pieces rather than maybe just what the job is.
Terry Cook:
And it might be things that support their mission because a lot of companies, their mission obviously is important to them. So they want to make sure that their review reflects what’s important to them and their mission so that the employee understands it and they know how they contribute towards it in their everyday job.
Pete Wright:
I mentioned five years ago… Of course, the coded language in there is post pandemic. Part of the shift has been toward at least some combination today of remote work even as more and more companies are asking their employees to come back. What has the impact of a culture embracing a culture of remote work had on review practices? What have managers had to learn?
Kyle Pardo:
This is a big question. We hear it a lot. It really is trusting employees. So in the past… Again, if we go back to the basics of something like punctuality, in the past, you could observe your employees showing up at work at nine o’clock and sitting down at their desk and being prepared and ready to answer their phone. We can’t quite do that in a virtual environment. So thinking about it in, “Is that really a focus or is it… On productivity, how many clients do they connect with that day? Or how was their response time on an email?” Or something else that you can quantify without necessarily seeing a person do their job. And for a lot of managers, they struggle with that.
Pete Wright:
What kind of struggles can you… Talk about what you may be seeing or what kind of hotline questions you’re getting from managers that really are struggling with figuring out how do you review someone when the things we counted on to review them against we cannot see?
Terry Cook:
I think a lot of it, as Kyle started to touch on, is the productivity. So really training your managers to say, “Okay, if you can’t see the person sitting in front of you, how are you able to see they’re doing their job?” Think about what that means. What do the results look like? What are the productivity expectations? And really talking about that as more of a focus than saying, “Is that person sitting in a chair across from you?” What do you want from that person? What are your expectations for that person? And then looking at how you can measure that, whether they’re in front of you or they’re in a remote office.
Pete Wright:
It seems like a really big shift, right? A shift in expectations on managers to be so much more focused on something that really maybe they should have been focused on all along.
Terry Cook:
And it’s trust, [inaudible 00:09:39]. Honestly, Pete, that’s… Like Kyle started off saying, it is trust. It’s a matter of really being able to say, “No, I know that this person’s doing what I’m expecting them to do.” And they have to have that shift over to that way of thinking. And to your other point, the results and the expectations should have been there the whole time, and it shouldn’t have mattered where that person was sitting, just that the results were happening.
Pete Wright:
Let’s talk then about incorporating this growth mindset into the employee review process. Right? We talked about how the reviews are sort of a throwback to going back to school. Well, what happens when your employee is going back to school, for lack of a better word? How do you incorporate in this new model of we can’t see them all the time? How do you incorporate learning and development into the review process?
Kyle Pardo:
Yeah, absolutely. Some of this I think is tied into the objectives that you write for an employee at the beginning of the year. So it might not be based off of those core competencies, but it might be based off of something like your sales records need to be at a certain level. So either number of items sold or whatever it might be. And if those types of numbers are not met or in preparation to make sure that they are met, what types of training needs to happen or learning development needs to happen to make sure we can get there?
So do you have the tools that you need? Do you have the language? Do you understand our products? Do you have the sales techniques? I’m just using that as an example to get there. And so having those measurable items, but then ensuring that your employees have the skills to reach it, it’s a reasonable goal. So when we go back and look at the end of the quarter or the end of the year that those numbers really make sense to the employee.
Pete Wright:
I think about the process of assigning what those numbers are, Kyle, and I think if I were the employee, I feel like I’d want to have a say in that. Right? So can we talk about just the multifocal review, what role the employee has in determining the outcomes of a particular review cycle?
Kyle Pardo:
Sure. It’s not in every review process, but a lot of companies will use two things. They’ll use a self-evaluation, so they’ll ask employees, “Evaluate yourself. Let me know what you did in the last year.” Because honestly, as a supervisor, it’s very difficult to remember back a full year and remember what somebody may have done. So it’s very helpful for the employee to have the opportunity to say, “Remember that great project I did last March? Here’s what happened and here’s what the results were.” It helps the supervisor understand that that’s something the employee was really proud of and can incorporate that information into the review. And similarly, to ask the employee to help create what those goals are for the coming year. Of course, if those goals don’t match up with what you’re expecting as a supervisor, again, it’s opening up those lines of communication to say, “Okay, we need to do more. We need to do different,” or something like that. But at least you’re opening up the conversation to see where the employee’s coming from and where you’re coming from as a supervisor.
Terry Cook:
Yeah, I think exactly what Kyle is saying, it’s really involving the employee and developing goals so that you get the buy-in, and once you know that they have the buy-in, then you know that they know how to get there or they at least have an idea that they need to achieve it. I think in addition to that, having the job description and the discussion over anytime you have a performance review, “I wonder if your job description has changed any or you think it’s changed any. Let’s talk about that.” It’s a good time to go through those items as well to see if anything’s changed. But also it’s a nice reminder to say, “Okay, you’ve outlined two goals, but your job involves quite a few others.” So when we look at this job description, does this seem accurate to you? And if it does, can we talk about setting some goals that might line up with some other parts of your job description?
Pete Wright:
So let’s dive then into the 360 review. I feel like the 360 is maybe waning in popularity. Is that a fair assessment?
Terry Cook:
Pete, I always tell people when you do a 360, you have to be completely prepared and you have to be prepared as a company. You have to have your management team prepared for a 360. Your employees have to be prepared for a 360, and you really have to know your process. Because I think with the 360, you’re getting the feedback, but can you handle it? Are you ready to handle it? Are you ready to react to it? I tell a story sometimes in one of my experiences in a 360. Thought we did a nice prep job, we had the process good, we had the discussions with people, and then we start getting results. And some people on the higher level said, “I want to see that paper that talked about that or where it came from.” And I said, “No, it’s all anonymous. That’s what we are doing in this particular 360.”
And they said, “Well, I want to see it because I want to see the writing. I’ll know who did it if I can see the writing.” Of course, they didn’t get to see the writing. But again, that’s part of what I’m saying, being prepared. Because when you get a 360, you’ll get things that are constructive feedback, you’ll get some criticism, you’ll get some people that are pretty blunt on some of their thoughts. And you as an organization have to be prepared to receive that feedback, whether it’s as a company, whether it’s as management team, as individuals. And you also have to be prepared to react. So if you’re doing a 360 and you’re not prepared to show the employees that you’re taking everything in and taking it seriously and being prepared to react, that’s where what you mentioned earlier about waning, that could be part of it because if a company isn’t prepared, then it actually can do more harm than good.
Pete Wright:
Maybe I don’t want to unfairly misconstrue waning popularity, but I think you just characterize the frustrations that come from the 360 and understanding the perils, the risks, that come in these choppy waters of feedback. If you’re not ready, especially as a management team, it can tell you a lot about culture. It’s sort of a litmus test of company culture depending on how you’re able to respond to the 360 process. That’s fascinating.
It has been a very long time since we have checked in on our fictitious manufacturing organization, and I’m eager to talk about this with you guys because we’ve never had a review process. It’s a new organization and they’ve never even instituted a review process. And so I would love to hear from you what you think would be the most effective way to implement a review process in our fake organization. How do you get people conditioned to expect reviews and the change that comes with how it works, Kyle?
Kyle Pardo:
Yeah, there’s a lot of pieces that come with that. So for our manufacturing company, we have a lot of work to do. A couple of things we need to think about. We need to think about, what is our employee structure? And by that I mean how many people report to each supervisor, for example. So if you have a supervisor that has 30 direct reports, what is your process going to be for feedback? Do you have the capacity to write a full performance appraisal of 30 people? And if not, you’re going to have to think about, “Okay, what’s another process? Maybe it’s just a regular feedback session.” And even if we said, “Okay, you have to meet with each of your employees for 15 minutes a quarter or 15 minutes a year,” do you have the time to do that, to add that into your schedule, and are we prepared to make that happen?
So before you even get into what the process is, think about what’s possible from a time perspective and a commitment perspective. I think the company needs to also think about training of the supervisors, letting them know what’s expected of them. You can’t write that, “Everybody in the company is doing a great job.” This is really meant to be constructive, and what does that look like? How do you write that up and what’s the importance of that documentation and how might that come back to you later?
And Terry can share more information on that. When people call the hotline and they say, “I want to terminate somebody,” she’s going to say, “What does your performance evaluation say?” So there needs to be training of the supervisor, and there needs to be training of the employees. If you’re going to roll out a new form, I would want to know what I’m going to be evaluated on. And we recently worked with a company that was putting together a new process, and I really liked their approach, which was they’re going to put this new process in place next year. So this year’s evaluation.
Pete Wright:
Oh, so much lead time.
Kyle Pardo:
Yeah, this year’s evaluation, they’re going to share next year’s form with their employees, and they’re going to talk through it and say, “Here’s what’s on it. Here’s the different criteria, here’s what I’m looking for.” So that employees have that information in advance and they can… So next year, it’s not a surprise. It goes back to that initial conversation we had of, “Am I prepared for it? Do I know what’s expected of me?” And it’s not a big deal.
Pete Wright:
I imagine savvy managers are conditioning their employees saying, “Hey, this is the form for next year. Let’s just see how you do against it throughout the year. Let’s just see what it looks like.” And there’s no judgments, it’s not going in your file. There’s no record, no lightning strikes when the word review is uttered across the organization.
Kyle Pardo:
Exactly.
Terry Cook:
Yeah, I think it is about everything that Kyle’s mentioning. And as Kyle said, we get a lot of questions on our helpline about people that say, “I need to do a discipline. I need to do a termination.” And the HR person will often, “I think I’ve done this myself. You look at the record.” And before you’d have an actual physical record and you’d shake it, and there’s nothing in there. So similar with electronic records. You can open somebody’s record and there’s nothing in it. So how did you get to the point to termination if you haven’t had it? And you pull up somebody’s performance review as Kyle mentioned, and it says, “Wow, Pete did a great job. He’s done excellent all year long,” and that was three weeks ago, and now they’re in the office. The supervisor saying, “Terry, I think that this person needs to be terminated.”
So going back to the original conversation that Kyle started, nothing should be a surprise. So if this employee, if Pete did not perform well in the manufacturing organization that we have, it shouldn’t be ignored and then actually completely glossed over in a performance review and then shortly thereafter, a termination expected. So I think all of those things that are important, making sure the employee knows what they’re being measured on, what their expectations are, and also making them realistic.
There are times where a performance review for certain parts of the organization, maybe people that are not executives, they might all be on a similar type of a form because it makes sense for them to be measured and discussed in certain ways. And then maybe the very top level, that form doesn’t make as much sense. Maybe that form actually becomes more of a, “Here are your objectives. I want to understand how you’ve met your objectives and let’s create objectives specifically for next year.” So I think just being open to understanding what is helpful for that manager and employee.
Pete Wright:
Sure. And we’ve so far been talking about the regular review process and hinting at, and I think Kyle aptly talked about regular feedback to my anxiety dream. This was podcast therapy. And I think it’s important as we get to wrapping up to talk a little bit about the sort of day-to-day, week to week kind of feedback that we’re looking at to make sure that the review isn’t a surprise. How do you train managers and condition the organization as a culture of feedback so that no feedback is necessarily coming out of the blue?
Kyle Pardo:
I personally like it when supervisors do it on a monthly basis would be ideal, quarterly if that’s not possible. But the conversation might go something like this where we’re going to focus on maybe two things in this meeting. So, “Pete, you did a great job in that report. It was great content. I know you put a lot of time into it, and I really appreciate the work you did. However, I’ve noticed the last couple of meetings that we’ve had, you’ve been late to those meetings and you haven’t shown up to work on time. Is anything going on? Anything I can help you with or anything I should be aware of?” Maybe that’s our conversation. Maybe you give me a little bit insight. Maybe there’s something going on in your life. And I might keep a note of that. And then we’re going to get together next month and next month we might talk about some other project you’re working on.
And I say, “You know what, Pete? I still am noticing that things aren’t coming in on time. You’re missing some deadlines. I’m getting a bit concerned about what’s going on here.” Third month, if we’re still having the same conversation, we now have a history there. We’ve been talking about it. It’s not a surprise. You know what my expectations are. I can say, “All right, we talked about this in September. We talked about October. Here we are in November, and it’s still coming up in conversation.” So then again, if you’re still employed, by the time we get to the performance review time-
Pete Wright:
Three months out.
Kyle Pardo:
… it’s not going to be a surprise. “We’ve already talked about this, Pete. This is a problem.”
Pete Wright:
The little hairs always stand up on the back of my neck in this conversation when you say, “Pete.” They really do. That is-
Kyle Pardo:
You’re taking it personally. I see that.
Terry Cook:
Oh. Oh, my God.
Pete Wright:
I don’t even write reports for you guys. It’s just really, really agonizing over this. Well, it’s really interesting stuff, and I think if we’re talking about the 8:00 AM day one action items for our HR pros listening to this show, it sounds like check your review process, right? Check your review process and make sure you’re eliminating surprise from the process chain.
Terry Cook:
Yep. And I think communication. Ongoing communication is very important. But just communicating with your employees, actively listening to what their needs are so that you’re both working together to get to the right goals for that employee and for the company. And I think, I guess if I were to add one last note, is I think an important part of what I’ve been reading lately, especially people entering the workforce, they really want that regular communication of how they can be developed, how they can move forward in a company, and what a company wants to do to support that. And oftentimes, if that piece is missing from the conversation, those employees might be heading out the door and the employee employer may have had already thoughts in their mind of promoting Pete. So there you go, Pete. Very positive.
Pete Wright:
Oh.
Kyle Pardo:
[inaudible 00:24:40], I like that.
Pete Wright:
Like a warm blanket, Terry.
Terry Cook:
Thank you.
Pete Wright:
Oh, man.
Terry Cook:
So just communicating everything. But I do think it’s a matter of really educating everybody, the employees, your managers, educating people, communicating, and just giving that feedback in a way that’s helpful.
Kyle Pardo:
I just want to make sure too, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the bad parts of performance reviews and those difficult performers. We should be focusing on the good people as well. And throughout the year, keep copies of emails that you get from people who compliment an employee, or if you have a customer service mechanism and you see something that calls out something that people have done, keep all those in your file as well. And at the end of the year, you have that information to pull from so you’re not starting from scratch. You can go back and refer to those as well. So we do have good employees. We don’t want to make it sound if you don’t.
Pete Wright:
We sure Do. You know what, Kyle? In the spirit of the 360 vibe, I know a number of organizations that we work with who have public high praise channels in their Slack groups and their team groups where other employees are shouting out one another for great work that their peers have done, and that has become just an amazing resource for performance reviews, right? When you can go back and see non-anonymous praise for work that was legitimately, objectively well done, that it makes everybody feel good about growing with the organization. Talk about establishing a great culture, really powerful. Well noted. I understand I had a nightmare about this, and so maybe I carried that a little bit into the conversation. I regret that. It’s all right. We’re doing fine. Thank you both. Where do we want to send people?
Kyle Pardo:
I think people could give us a call. It’s not a one-size-fits-all, and so it’s typically a conversation that we have with companies to really find out what their goals are and what their process might look like, and we can certainly help them with that.
Terry Cook:
But we also have training both on performance appraisals and coaching.
Pete Wright:
Links in the show notes. Along with that, link to the hotline. If you’ve got any questions, we clearly can answer them. So call the hotline, send an email to the hotline, check that out, swipe up in your show notes. We’ve got all the resources there. Thank you so much for hanging out and joining us for this show. We appreciate your time and your attention. On behalf of our own, Kyle Pardo and Terry Cook, I’m Pete Wright. We’ll see you back here next week on Human Solutions, Simplifying HR for People who Love HR.