At this time of the year, one of the more important and difficult tasks is the annual review. Now, coming from the glazing industry, I really didn’t have much of an example for how this should work. I never had a review until I came to Walters & Wolf! So, when I was promoted to this position, I needed to come up with some type of system. I thought I’d share what I’ve been doing. I know that I always wanted to have a review. If you are a manager and are not currently doing reviews, maybe this article will help you get started. If you are already doing reviews, hopefully some things in here could help with your process.
First, let’s start with the purpose. There is a lot of opinions out there about performance reviews. A lot of them are negative. In fact, there are many people that argue that this process should be eliminated because it is done so poorly. I think that the performance review is very valuable. I think it can be a very positive experience for both the manager and the employee. There are three key things I’m trying to accomplish in a review.
First, are we on the same page? Does my opinion of how you are doing, and your opinion match up? Are the things I think are important for you and the things you are prioritizing the same?
Second, I want to know how you did. You have goals you are trying to achieve and projects you are trying to complete. How did you do? What things did you learn? We build our resume every day. If you were updating your resume and adding some new accomplishment bullets to it, what would they be?
Third, let’s talk about where we are going. What should you be focusing on going forward? What training or coaching will you need to accomplish your goals? Where is your career headed? What do you need to get there? This is the most important part of the review and usually takes up 90% of the time.
So, I start with the job description. This document describes what I should be seeing you do each day. It also gives an overview of the philosophy of the company and also what the department focus is. I review this document carefully and update it to match any changes that have occurred. This is the first step in the review.
Second, we have a one page form for our “self-review”. The top of the form has items from the job description and a ranking of 1 to 5 (one being I really don’t do this and five being I’m doing this all the time). The middle of the form asks what you have accomplished this year and the bottom of the form asks what you are targeting to accomplish next year. I send this out a week or two before the reviews. I have them spend a little time re-reading the job description and then filling out their self-review.
Now, after I’ve received the self-reviews and have the updated job description, I write up a written review for each employee. I let them know how I see things. The accomplishments we have made over the past year and the goals we are shooting for moving forward. Areas that they can help and what training or coaching may be required. I send this written review to them at least a day before we meet.
I schedule an hour for the annual review meeting. Now, I want to make it clear that I don’t really look at this as a review. I look at this as a “preview”. The purpose is not to explain how an entire year went by and the employee was doing all the wrong things. Any corrective items should have been discussed in our one-on-one’s that we hold weekly. No, this meeting is to celebrate the wins, or be honest about difficulties we have already discussed.
The very first part of the meeting we will go over the self-review. I really just want to be sure we are on the same page about how we see things. If they’ve rated themselves as all 5’s and I think they were mostly 2’s, we need to talk. But please understand, if that happens, it’s my fault. I have a weekly one-on-one with every direct and I need to be making small course corrections all year long. If my evaluation and their self-review don’t match, then I’m doing something wrong. This hasn’t happened yet, so normally we are just touching on things that are one’s and two’s. Are these things still important? Should we re-evaluate them? For instance, we might have an item from the job description for someone in purchasing that says “update the report 3 every Thursday for the PM’s”. If they have put that as a one or a two, then we need to decide if this item is not really working or if we need to re-focus on getting this to happen all the time. We might want to see if the PM’s are really using this information. If you haven’t really been doing it and no one is complaining, then maybe this item needs to be eliminated.
The second part of the meeting focuses on where we are going. Usually, people are unsure of what to put down for the future goal. This is normal. I want to know what they want to focus on, but for the most part, people want to know what the company needs them to focus on. This comes from our annual off-site and what the goals for the year are. These get broken down to what each department will need to do to achieve that goal. We then need to break that down into what each individual can do to help us get there. This is where most of the meeting is focused. I want to share what the upcoming year looks like, what the challenges are, what we need to do to get there, and then discuss how this particular employee can help with that. We then will pencil in what those goals should look like.
The employee needs to set their goals. I let them know the direction, but the goals are their choice. They should align with the direction but they should be something they feel passionate about.
The actual summation of the goals will probably take a few more weeks to complete. We can do this in our one-on-one meetings. But at the end of the review, the employee knows how the year went, we have spent some time making sure we are aligned on the priorities and the focus, and we’ve established some specific things to work on in the coming year that will help them grow and help grow the company.
