Prepare for your Employee Reviews

“What can you to ensure that you are prepared for your employee reviews?”

There is one sure-fire way to make your people feel valued, that is to be prepared for your performance reviews. If you are not prepared it will send a message to your people that they are not important enough for you to prepare for their performance interview.

On this site we emphasis the point, you cannot take shortcuts with people management. So, how do you prepare properly for a performance interview? 

Before the Performance Appraisal Interview

Firstly let’s find out how long it takes to prepare properly for a performance review.

The amount of time required to prepare for a performance review depends on how easy it is to access to the information that you need to rate your employee, and which rating method you are using and how diverse the tasks completed by your employees are.

As a minimum you will need to

If you have a group of employees completing the same easily measured tasks and you have easy access to the information that you require to complete your employee ratings you may only need 30 minutes to prepare for your performance appraisals.

Where, if you have a diverse group of employees whose work is not easily measured then you may require 2 hours of preparation time for each employee’s performance appraisal.

Pre-Assessment – before your employee reviews

Before you enter into a performance review you should have formed an opinion on the rating that you intend to give your employee, however you should be open to influence and flexible to change your rating based on any evidence that the employee may present.

Once you have formed an opinion take time to ensure the rating you have in mind is consistent with performance feedback that you have provided throughout the year, it is critical that the rating that you give during your employee reviews is consistent with feedback provided during the year. Any inconsistency will cause dissatisfaction.

Once you have completed your preparation, it might help to print out your performance feedback forms, collate any evidence or data that you intend to refer during your appraisal interview and collate with your last performance review. (mid year or last end of yea review) 

20 minutes before your scheduled discussion, complete a quick review of the pack.

Examples, Templates, How to Guide, it's all here

• Appraisal Home Page

Phase 1

• Rating methods
• Establishing performance standards

Phase 2

• Measuring results
• Rating Errors
• Prepare for your appraisal interview

Phase 3

• The performance interview
• After the performance interview

Process Map

Tips & Techniques

Free Templates

• Rating Scale
• Essay Style
• MBO
• BARS
• Download

Appraisal PowerPoint Presentation

Examples

• Good Performer
• Average Performer
• Poor Performer
• Intangible Measure

Booking your Employee Reviews

It is wise to book an appraisal interview sufficiently in advance that both the manager and the employee have time to prepare for the discussion. Generally, 10 – 14 days before the interview is considered enough time.

It is important that your employee be clear about the nature of the discussion, ideally you will send a meeting invitation using your calendar tool, say Microsoft Outlook, and

However, before you send the meeting requests to your employees, speak to them. In your team meetings in April, May and June remind your team that your end of year reviews are coming up in July. This will help your people to feel more relaxed about their performance reviews.
 

Next Steps

Let your employee reviews run smoothly, here are some tips and techniques from highly experienced leaders that will ensure your performance reviews run smoothly. Including tips on how to deal with those difficult employees.