
Julia Tate
By Julia Tate, MA, HR Management Consultant
The end of the calendar year signals a time to reflect on how life turned out including the time spent at your job. I often hear that annual performance reviews are dreaded by both employees and their managers. It takes lots of time, can trigger anxiety and may not provide adequate direction for moving toward better performance outcomes. While review forms, scoring frameworks and sophisticated analysis platforms have their place, here are key questions that can serve as a foundation for any of those tools. They can even form the entire process if you do not have a system in place already.
- What is going well? This offers both the employee and manager a place to recognize wins that occurred during the review period. It starts you on a positive note.
- What are your challenges? It takes a good amount of trust to explore this question. You will want to focus on the processes and outcomes rather than intentions. A process, we can change and improve, an intention may be limited by attitude which takes more effort to change. This leads to our next question.
- What needs to change? An open conversation for this question has the potential to discover new ways of thinking about how work gets done as well as surfacing optional methods that increase efficiency and productivity.
- What do you need now? Here is your action plan. Getting the details down on paper will help both the employee and the manager to commit to next steps. I like to see milestones and timelines included so your progress can be tracked and celebrated along the way.
While there are numerous sub-questions to these, they provide a clear pathway for the conversation. Because they are so simple, you can use them for any check in conversation or even as the foundation for team meetings. This series of questions can be used in your personal life as well. Consider using them next time there is a debate among family members. Give them a try and happy new year to all!
Julia Tate is the Principal Consultant for HR Executive Partners, based in Watertown and serving Midwest organizations for more than 20 years. She is a thought leader on various topics of interest to employers and their teams which may be found at www.HRExecutivePartners.com. This article was written unaided by AI.