Hate Your Annual Performance Appraisal? What About Weekly Reviews?
The Wall Street Journal reports that some companies are stopping the year end performance appraisal nightmare and replacing it with much more frequent feedback. They write:
With many younger workers used to instant feedback--from text messages to Facebook and Twitter updates--annual reviews seem too few and far between. So companies are adopting quarterly, weekly or even daily feedback sessions.Okey-dokey. Back in prehistoric times people used to call this conversation. See, what would happen is Ogg would shove a big stick through a lump of mastodon meat and hold it over the fire. Ogg didn't rotate the meat so when everyone sat down to dinner, Gurg said, "Hey, Ogg, next time, can you please rotate the meat while it's over the fire? It cooks more evenly that way. Plus, I really like mastodon with an oregano, sea salt and garlic rub."
Gurg didn't have to suffer through a whole year of flavorless ill-cooked meat to tell Ogg a better way and he didn't have to schedule a meeting to tell him either. He just said it. (And why didn't Gurg just do it himself? Because cooking the meat was Ogg's job, of course. Gurg managed the entire dinner production department.)
Somewhere along the line, managers developed this fear of saying anything outside a formal setting. They like to save things up, and then throw them out all at once and document the heck out of it. This is all fine and good, but in the meantime you're eating half raw mastodon meat. And we don't want that.
Alison Green, at Ask A Manager just fielded a question from a manager who wanted to know if leaving off a job on a resume was considered lying. See, it turns out that the employee started having problems and instead of correcting the problems, the manager went and hunted down a previous company and called them. Green calls this behavior weird and writes:
But more to the point: If you're having problems with this employee, you need to address those problems head-on. It sounds like you're looking for an "easy out" to fire him and are hoping that lying on the application will be it. But you shouldn't need an easy out; unless you're in a highly bureaucratic environment that makes it near-impossible for you to fire someone (like the government or, often, a unionized company), you should handle this the exact same way that you'd handle it if the job history issue had never come up.See, no matter what you've been handed, your job is to manage and managing requires regular communication with employees. What regular means depends on the job and the person's level of performance. Managers should be managing for results, so this may mean daily chats or monthly chats or feedback via Rypple or other software when appropriate. I hate the idea of the company dictating a schedule, but realize that frequently managers aren't giving feedback at all.Specifically, start managing him: Explain in clear terms what he needs to do differently in order to keep his job, be explicit about the fact that his job will be in jeopardy if he doesn't immediately begin meeting that bar, and then replace him if he hasn't had a turnaround within a few weeks.
So should you have weekly feedback sessions? Absolutely. But, you don't need to make them formal. Speak up when it's necessary. Hold regular one on one meetings with your staff so you're in the loop on projects and plans and don't forget that you don't have to wait until the annual year end review to give feedback--positive or negative.
For further reading:
- Why a Formal Performance Review is Unnecessary
- 6 Ways to Give Feedback to Your Boss and Coworkers
- Can You Make a Bad Employee (or Boss) Better
