New Year’s Resolution? Take the Hassle Out of Performance Reviews!
Amidst the hectic holiday activities this time of year, many leaders are stuck with the last minute writing of performance reviews. If you would like to have a better 2018, resolve to create a new system for a new year.
What most leaders do is make the whole process so much more difficult for themselves by not keeping good documentation throughout the year, resulting in a last minute dash to the finish line to recreate what occurred.
Instead… follow these tips and…”At the end of the year,
you will have a beautiful documentation trail
and your employees will have done all the work.”
Resolve to make the employee performance review process easy and efficient. Start right now doing the following:
- Understand the purpose of reviews. They are to help your staff develop and grow. Even if you think they are just paperwork, your people take them seriously and so should you.
- Realize that employees are not the only ones who take reviews seriously, so do judges and juries. Reviews will be the first thing that any attorney – your own or the opposition’s – will want to see to justify what you did.
- Make documentation easier by doing a mini “brain dump” at the end of every day. Just spend five minutes writing down in your manager’s file anything that occurred with regard to an employee matter.
- Learn how to know what to document. We had a manager in one of our classes who had been sued three times by employees. Of course it’s always good to learn from our mistakes so we asked him what he had learned. He said that he learned that it is not useful to ask “should I document this?” — because then the answer will frequently be no. Instead, he said that he had learned he needed to ask: “if this happens again, will I wish I had documented this? — because then the answer will usually be yes.”
- Make employees do the work for you. After every “one-on-one” that you have with employees, ask them to email back to you what you said. Since most of us don’t listen well, you will be depressed and amazed at what comes back, but it gives you an opportunity to straighten out any misunderstandings. At the end of the year, you will have a beautiful documentation trail and your employees will have done all the work.
 Did You Know
Our management and leadership classes all cover the importance of performance reviews and documentation.
Call or write us at: 303-216-1020 or Lynne@workplacesthatwork.com
Learn more about our training offerings and check out our team members at:
Be sure to read Lynne’s book “We Need to Talk” – Tough Conversations with Your Employee and learn how to tackle any topic with sensitivity and smarts.
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December 25, 2017
