Crowdsourcing: a 7+7 Primer (Pt. 1) Mike | January 16th, 2012

We write often about small businesses and startups and lean approaches to marketing and other business functions. Mid- to large-size companies can also benefit from the lean methodology and one way to do so is by actively leveraging crowds of workers: designers, software engineers, testers, writers, customer support people, customers, market researchers, and dozens of other groups via the Internet.

Crowdsourcing, like many business activities had distinct advantages both strategic and economic, but the process also comes with its own set of unique pitfalls and dangers. Careful planning and good management of the process can mitigate the risks, but it is crucial that managers understand some of the issues and challenges involved as well as best practices for successful crowdsourcing. I’ve created a list of 7 big-picture issues that companies should consider as they plan their crowdsourced projects. Next week I will discuss the 7 steps companies can take to ensure a successful outcome for their crowdsourced projects. Here then, 7 “Big Picture” thoughts on how best to crowdsource your next project.

1. Make a choice and determine a venue: The critical first question for a manager considering crowdsourcing is simple and binary: is it the best choice for this project? There are many ways to complete a project, and determining how to do so is not just a choice of economy, or convenience, but also a choice of value delivered. Crowdsourcing can be of substantial economic benefit, but this comes with some trade-offs as well. You must answer the question for yourself: do the benefits of the crowd outweigh the benefits of a more traditional outsourcing, partnering, or in-house approach?

If the answer too this is a ‘yes’ the next step is to determine the venue for your project. There are dozens existing online communities and platforms that managers can leverage for tasks ranging from transcription to translation (Amazon Mechanical Turk), QA to RD (uTest to Innocentive), and coding to composing (TopCoder to musikpitch); these are readily available and easy to use, but some companies have chosen to host their own crowds and develop their own technical capacity. Keep in mind that the existing services have already done a great deal of the heavy lifting and because of that, they can deliver great value to you. It takes time and commitment to build a community of skilled workers in any domain, as well as more time and money to build the underlying technology, infrastructure, policies and protections necessary to the process. A DIY approach to crowdsourcing makes sense for a long-term approach, but many companies will want to experiment and learn before they decide to build their own.

2. Manage the process: Be certain that you don’t simply throw open the doors to your project without thorough preparation, active involvement, and careful oversight. The assumption that, once launched, a project will run itself is a very dangerous expectation and can easily lead to the failure of the project, as well as a likely inability to repeat the experiment going forward. Actively managing a crowdsourced project is no more or less difficult than managing a project executed in-house, but does come with a different set of hazards. Remember the Internets are a wild and scary place populated with creatures rarely seen in your warm conference room, so keep in mind that a crowdsourced project can get out of hand and without your own diligent participation you risk the success of the undertaking.

3. Control quality: The quality of the final work product is a key goal when managing any product, project, or process and crowdsourced projects require your careful oversight to ensure high-quality. Because many crowdsourcing communities are open platforms which have low barriers to participation, the quality of the submitted work can often be subject to great (ahem) variability. The role of the project manager is to act as gatekeeper, curator, editor, and leader and this guidance is vital to the project’s success. Take care to quickly identify the best work being done and the most talented participants, then take the time to communicate directly with those workers. Just as quickly identify the low-quality work and politely (but firmly) discourage those workers from participating further. Some platforms provide tools to assist with this, but often it will be up to the manager to perform this role.

4. Recruit and manage the crowd: Essential to the success of your crowdsourced project is the crowd itself. Established communities have done much of this work for you, but you will have to take the time to recruit the appropriate talent to participate in your project. If using an established community, marketing your project to the community is critical and you should try to promote it however you can: via emails or messages, newsletter inclusion, or by leveraging any features the site may offer such as internal promotion packages and display placement options. If you are going the build-it-yourself approach careful use of social media tools, public relations, and other word-of-mouth tactics can help you to attract the right workers to participate. Keep in mind that established communities typically have their own rules and policies designed to help you succeed: codes of conduct, user agreements, community policing and enforcement protocols are often in place and if you decide to go it on your own, you will want to make sure you have thought these through and are ready to take action to enforce your policies.

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Twitter Link Roundup #116 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More Ross | January 13th, 2012

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

The video above contains 160 of the best one liners from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. That post, and other interesting posts are in the “Other” section below.

Small Businesses Spending More And More On Social Media – http://bit.ly/wvg6rw

Give Your Employees Unlimited Vacation Days – http://bit.ly/w2aCvA

Good interview with Mike Samson by @butleronbiz about biz w/ friends – bit.ly/wBFfBv

Five kinds of work to farm out to the crowd – http://bit.ly/Az9JmC

Pinterest for Brands: 5 Hot Tips – http://bit.ly/wZETZN

Give the Users What They Really Want – http://perfor.ms/tWUUnD

Good suggestions from @stoweboyd on handling customer service questions and issues – http://t.co/80Fc5ocd

Interesting and good read, especially for women … Confidence is a Numbers Game – http://bit.ly/w1zaqB

10 things entrepreneurs can learn from chefs – http://bit.ly/AyAln3

Mark Cuban’s 12 Rules for Startups – http://bit.ly/wVvAVK

What It’s Like To Be An Entrepreneur – Eboo Patel – http://t.co/ZaotKCvl

What history teaches us about startup incubators – http://bit.ly/w7vLYB

Why You Can’t Hire – http://t.co/5E9bi0tV

Good suggestions from @stoweboyd on handling customer service questions and issues – http://t.co/80Fc5ocd

4 Skills Every Startup Employee Needs – http://bit.ly/ynUZIr

When To Get Rid of Your MVP – http://bit.ly/AgEek6

When Reviewing A New Idea, Never Forget Its First Impression – http://onforb.es/yBYqmJ

The power of failing – http://t.co/KCxzb69f

Pinterest for Brands: 5 Hot Tips – http://bit.ly/wZETZN

Five kinds of work to farm out to the crowd – http://bit.ly/Az9JmC

Why do we pay sales commissions? – http://bit.ly/yTEoDi

Give the Users What They Really Want – http://perfor.ms/tWUUnD

Interesting and good read, especially for women … Confidence is a Numbers Game – http://bit.ly/w1zaqB

Give Your Employees Unlimited Vacation Days – http://bit.ly/w2aCvA

Smart: A Man. A Van. A Surprising Business Plan. – http://n.pr/w5KGsB

Good interview with Mike Samson by @butleronbizabout biz w/ friends – bit.ly/wBFfBv

Small Businesses Spending More And More On Social Media – http://bit.ly/wvg6rw

Worst Use Of Social Media of 2012: Boners BBQ – http://bit.ly/zcrHYf

It’s no secret that visitor data measured by Alexa, Compete and others is flat our wrong – http://mz.cm/wXaQ4K

Good LeWeb talk by Jeremiah Owyang about scaling your business to leverage social media – http://bit.ly/x1g7t9

PR to come to grips with Data (or not) – http://bit.ly/yLg6ca

Interesting and good read, especially for women … Confidence is a Numbers Game – http://bit.ly/w1zaqB

Pinterest for Brands: 5 Hot Tips – http://bit.ly/wZETZN

Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World” – http://selnd.com/ynKBiD

Wow – $99,344,382 pledged on Kickstarter in 2011. The Year in Kickstarter – http://j.mp/xmuEHu

New High-Quality Free Fonts – http://bit.ly/ybWRte

40+ Fresh And Useful Adobe Illustrator Tutorials – http://t.co/Ip3CGZBY

50+ Creative collection of business cards – http://bit.ly/xuaAIJ

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Small Businesses Spending More And More On Social Media Ross | January 10th, 2012

According to a newly released study from Borrell Associates, small businesses are spending more of their budgets on social media. In fact, small and medium size businesses expect to spend nearly as much on social media as they do on search engine marketing (see table below).

This is not surprising and confirmed by other recent survey data, including a survey from StrongMail on 2012 marketing trends). Although the survey data is inconclusive and often conflicting, most surveys report that 40 to 70 percent of small and medium size businesses are using social media. Non-survey data tends to support those results (58.2 percent of SMBs have a presence on social media networks, according to Palore – but these numbers are not clear-cut because between 40 and 50 percent of the businesses who self-identify as using social media on Facebook, for example, have little or no activity there).

Perhaps the most important piece of data (other than adoption) concerns the methods businesses use to measure success in social media. Although it’s not clear how most businesses track this – many use customer acquisition as the key success metric. Fans/friends/followers are also an important metric (see graph below).

How active is your small business on social networks and how do you measure success? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.



10 things entrepreneurs can learn from chefs Mike | January 9th, 2012

Who among us doesn’t love a great meal? Whether we choose eat at home or in a restaurant, all of us appreciate and respect the work that goes into preparing and presenting our food. We love the humble diner which serves up a phenomenal burger and fries and marvel over the lavish cuisine served up at a 4-star establishment. The proprietors of these two distinctly different types of business have a great deal in common – with each other as well as with the community of entrepreneurs in general. They understand their market, work hard to satisfy their customers, and create a high-quality product and service to compete effectively against each other as well as the thousands and thousands of other restaurants at hand. This is the latest in a series of posts I have been working on that discusses how we can draw lessons for our own ventures from the world around us – specifically from unexpected quarters. Last year, I wrote about how much we can learn from kids, about what dogs  and musicians can teach us, and how we can draw inspiration from athletes. Today the great chefs of the world get their turn; these artists are are often wonderful business people and genuinely entrepreneurial, but are admired for their unending creativity and dedication to their craft. Great chefs work everyday to achieve perfection, and we can each learn from their example and their pursuit of the consummate creme brûlée (or burgér, if that should be your personal preference).

1. Chefs live by their creativity. There are not many businesses that are completely dependent on a continuous flow of creativity. Entertainment, advertising, and fine art are among the few industries built completely on a creative output. Fine dining stands among these as an example of pure creativity as a service and a product and the best chefs live and die purely on their ability to create. The chef who loses this ability can no longer compete and can no longer serve their customers or their market.

2. Chefs develop skills over time. Like a great musician a chef develops their skills and technique over many years of practice and refinement. Cooking is not just an art form, but also a craft and the tools, methods, and skills can take years to master. Whether classically trained, or self-taught the great chefs have worked hard to develop their expertise and these abilities are what set them apart and make them unique.

3. Chefs perfect. We speak and write often about the importance of iteration and constant improvement and the best chefs are masters of this. Developing great recipes is a time consuming process and the analogy to developing our own products or services is apt: take the time to develop yours by a process of refinement and repetition until it is as delicious as can be.

4. Chefs listen to their customers. Can you think of another profession where your customer is more critical to the process? Seriously, if they don’t like your product they will leave. They won’t come back and they won’t send their friends to eat the food either. In other industries, the entrepreneur can survive if their product is OK, or even of they have a fail or two. If you are to compete in the world of the chef, you had better pay close attention to that customer and their happiness with your food or you will not have a customer left.

5. Chefs work in teams. Great food is often, though not always, a team endeavor and the skills if the team are crucial. Chefs compete for talent on their staffs just the way you compete for talent in your business. And, as with any team, chef’s teams are an aggregate of the necessary skills and abilities needed to get the job done: sous chefs, line cooks, prep cooks, wait staff, mixologists all contribute to the overall experience of the customer and each of these folks come with their own talents and abilities. Read the rest of this post »



Twitter Link Roundup #115 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More Ross | January 5th, 2012

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

The image above is taken in Takotna, Alaska during the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on March 9, 2011. The green in the sky is the aurora borealis. More phenomenal photos from 2011 are in the Other section below.

10 New Years Resolutions For Small Businesses and Startups – http://bit.ly/t7wmEP

Small Businesses and Startups: Worst. Advice. Ever. – http://bit.ly/v6SwXL

Five Tips To Improve Employee Performance Reviews – http://t.co/qujdIQZk

Radio Still Good Advertising Option for Small Business – http://t.co/oVRqihB3

crowdSPRING’s Small Business Spotlight of the Week: CorpsAfrica – http://bit.ly/x2iA7L

The ideal product manager – http://perfor.ms/uK2qJu

Stop whining and start hiring remote workers – http://bit.ly/vviGal

Good suggestions on handling customer service questions and issues – http://sto.ly/whZCLX

crowdSPRING’s Small Business Spotlight of the Week: Flightwise/ MyRadar Mobile Apps – http://t.co/5TTMqMLJ

crowdSPRING’s Small Business Spotlight of the Week: NinjaDog Concepts – http://t.co/JVMH0TfV

Small Businesses and Startups: Worst. Advice. Ever. – http://bit.ly/v6SwXL

Should Startups Focus on Profitability or Not? – http://t.co/83e0h2kS

Mark Cuban on Why You Should Never Listen to Your Customers – http://t.co/b5DHvVmz

The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives – http://onforb.es/zZqYcZ

My advice to startups pitching the media – http://perfor.ms/vbXP8P

Five Tips To Improve Employee Performance Reviews – http://t.co/qujdIQZk

Some Thoughts On The IPO Market For Web Companies (by @fredwilson) – http://t.co/WzfBvutC

Marc Andreessen: Predictions for 2012 (and beyond) – http://t.co/2Y3XJq2G

The ideal product manager – http://perfor.ms/uK2qJu

There’s Only One Thing In Life You Can Control: Your Own Effort – http://read.bi/u32aYq

CEC’s Startup Forecast – “Never been a better time to start a company in Chicago” – http://t.co/8FckJve9

Mocked And Misunderstood – http://t.co/ubJCMtdq

Experienced entrepreneurs preserve equity – http://perfor.ms/uquQlD

What It’s Like To Be An Entrepreneur – Eboo Patel – http://bit.ly/ynsVZA

Good suggestions on handling customer service questions and issues – http://sto.ly/whZCLX

Stop whining and start hiring remote workers – http://bit.ly/vviGal

10 New Years Resolutions For Small Businesses and Startups – http://bit.ly/t7wmEP

The State of Social Marketing 2011 – 2012 – http://t.co/38z8IOAc

Has Twitter caused journalism to turn narcissistic? – http://bit.ly/vod6qk

Advertising Isn’t Dead – The Creative Process Is – http://bit.ly/u34ztJ

Advertising Firms Need To Be Downsized Before They Become Too Dumb For Their Own Good – http://t.co/niRIhwhx

End of an Era: The Golden Age of Tech Blogging is Over – http://t.co/CvUPSIRf

SEO Pricing: 600+ Agencies Share Costs of Services & Pricing Models – http://mz.cm/yeySyi

How Google+ Is Changing the Web, Even Though No One Wants It To – http://bit.ly/zeoG6J

Mobile Users Split on Check-In Services – http://t.co/deg6RQp4

Social network addiction around the world (Israelis are the most addicted) – http://t.co/RAXUY6kd

So great to see such strong support for interesting KickStarter projects (espresso machine) – http://t.co/tx9eiUln

Strong and prompt response from FedEx – good to see – to the monitor throwing video – http://t.co/1xMPCASl

Good to see Yelp/BWM integration – but are we heading to app overload in cars? - http://t.co/Idyq5U4L

The media’s fixation on size (Google+ vs. Facebook) is misguided. Why do we continue to obsess about size? – http://bit.ly/tSXmCi

Last Collection Of Creative Ads For 2011 – http://t.co/nA8Drm2Y

45 Creative Alcohol Advertisements – http://t.co/aafNlnRe

65 Free Fonts for Graphic Designers – http://bit.ly/vUwZRj

Best Of 2011: 40 Detailed Photoshop Icon Design Tutorials – http://t.co/zhcReo9P

Top 50 Photoshop Tutorials of 2011 – http://t.co/54BJzrkP

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The January cS Award and The December cS Award Winner Mike | January 4th, 2012

Last summer, we announced that we would issue a monthly cS Award to honor quality work by designers and writers in the crowdSPRING community.

January cS Award

The cS awards are designed to celebrate the incredibly talented designers and writers in the crowdSPRING community and to encourage high quality work as well as community-oriented behavior. The most successful Creatives on the site are those who understand how to listen closely to a Buyer, how to read and interpret a project brief, and how to respond to a Buyer’s feedback with appropriate and creative revisions to their entries.

Typically these Creatives are rewarded with high scores from Buyers, so this month we want to focus on the Creatives who submit the greatest number of high-scoring entries. So for the January cS Award, we will award $1,000 to the Creative who receives the greatest number of 4 and 5-star ratings on their submissions! All crowdSPRING writers and designers will be eligible for this award, but you must compete in at least 5 projects and submit at least 10 entries during the month of January.

Good luck everyone  - we look forward to seeing your January entries receive tons of praise!

 

And now…. the December cS Award Winner….

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Small Business Spotlight of the Week: CorpsAfrica Amanda | January 4th, 2012

The stress of the holidays and debauchery of the New Year has faded away and, for a lot of us, this means we try to get serious about things we want to change in our lives. For some, this might mean losing weight, quitting smoking or finally watching all five Rocky films. According to USA.gov, one of the most common New Year’s resolutions is to help others more often.

CorpsAfrica is a small non-profit that aims to allow African communities take control and begin to work on solutions to poverty. Instead of sending volunteers from countries that have little understanding of the real issues, CorpsAfrica is about empowering locals with the resources to come up with practical answers. The NPO provides volunteers with training, curriculum, and facilities to help reach these goals. They are currently working in Morocco and Malawi, but hope to expand to all 54 African nations. You can access their donation page here.

Founder and Executive Director, Liz, goes more in-depth about CorpsAfrica:

How would you explain what you do to somebody’s grandmother?

CorpsAfrica helps Africans be “Peace Corps Volunteers” in their own countries – and drive solutions to poverty at the community level.

What are some industry specific challenges you faced? 

Being a nonprofit, the challenge is always fundraising.  Particularly in this down economy, securing start-up funding is so hard.  For CorpsAfrica to establish an office, we need an initial investment of at least $100,000: for the office space, training facilities, curriculum and, of course, the trainers, transportation expenses, insurance and other administrative expenses. The first staff person is the biggest hurdle, we’d need enough money in the bank to ensure their employment for at least six months,  and we need to hire someone good. The success of the program will depend 99% on the in-country person we hire to run it. Read the rest of this post »



What It’s Like To Be An Entrepreneur – Eboo Patel Ross | January 4th, 2012

We’re thrilled to be part of a new web/TV reality series – Trep Life – giving audiences a unique, 360-degree view of what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur.

Each episode focuses on one company or organization. The first episode featured our friends Matt Maloney and Mike Evans from Grub Hub – a terrific place to find every restaurant that will deliver to you. Subsequent episodes featured Lara Miller, a designer and Executive Director of the Chicago Fashion Incubator, serial entrepreneur Howard Tullman, Redbox Founder Mark Rechler, and James Miller and Samantha Ballenger of Network After Work. crowdSPRING was featured in episode six.

The latest episode features Eboo Patel, a social entrepreneur who founded Interfaith Youth Core in 2002, with a mission to make interfaith cooperation a social norm. Watch below:



Small Businesses and Startups: Worst. Advice. Ever. Mike | January 3rd, 2012

A few weeks ago I wrote about New Year ‘s resolutions for small businesses, but the other day I realized I had left one out. This one is not an action item, nor an intellectual exercise. It is at once very simple, but also incredibly difficult, especially when under pressure to get a new business off the ground to improve performance in an existing one. It is this: learn to differentiate between good advice and bad. And once you have mastered the skill of identifying bad advice, develop a second skill: the ability to discount and reject it.

Everyone who has ever launched a business has been subjected to the clamor that arises from well intentioned investors, family, friends, and casual cocktail-party-type acquaintances. Each of them has a pearl of wisdom, a relevant anecdote, or a driving reason why you should do this or should not do that. Each of them is absolutely certain that, if you follow their sage advice, your business will rocket to the stars, Google will acquire it for $1.7 billion, and your success will be forever assured. While some of their advice may actually be of interest, you will assuredly reject the majority of it as coming from someone who doesn’t understand your business, your market, and your customers.

We have all been on the receiving end of this advice, so in this article I am going to share with you some of the worst business advice ever given. Here then, are 5 pieces of bad advice I have been given, and my reasons for rejecting each:

1. Your Idea Won’t WorkEveryone has an opinion, and it is incredible how often you wil be told that your idea for a new business simply won’t work. People seem to love sharing this feedback, perhaps because it helps them to feel smarter or more powerful. In startups you need to trust your own opinion, and you need to back it up with research. Do your homework, provide your own skepticism, question your own biases, but trust yourself and the homework you do to answer that question for yourself.

2. Faster Is Always BetterSpeed to market is critical for many startups, and many of us tout our ability to iterate quickly, our flexibility in managing our business, and our potential to pivot when the market demands it. But speed is not always of the essence, and business owners need to understand that often it is best to take the time to ponder a decision, sleep on a proposal, or throughly debate an issue. Everything has its place, speed included, but faster is definitely not always better.

3. If you want it done right, then do it yourself. The most valuable commodity that an entrepreneur has is time. Time to think, time to act, time to execute. Managing your time is critical to the success of your business and one of the best ways to do this is to delegate. Hire talented people, train them well, then launch them into the world by delegating to them work which your personal capacity constraints simply does not allow you to perform. To grow your business, you will inevitably have to grow your team and that inescapable fact means that you will have to trust others to do the work. The best advice I have seen on this topic was in a post Ross wrote last year: don’t be afraid to delegate, but make sure that you get your own hands dirty before handing off that task.

4. I Can Teach You Everything. One trap that many entrepreneurs fall into is the mentor-snare. We meet someone who seems wise, experienced, and thoughtful. Someone who exudes confidence and tells us that they can teach us everything we need to know. While there is great value in having trusted mentors and teachers, be wary that you don’t become enmeshed in the ideas and advice offered by someone whose experience may not be appropriate, whose wisdom may run thin, and whose confidence could be misplaced. Trust yourself, trust your instincts, and trust your hard work to answer the question of whether another person’s advice is worthy of acting upon. My advice? Learn from lots of people, but take care that you don’t become overly dependent on just one.

5. Play it safe. By its very nature entrepreneurism is risky and I believe the risk should be embraced, not avoided. The trick it to do everything you can to mitigate the risk and to improve your odds of success. Do your homework, hire the best talent you can find, keep expenses as low as possible, and keep it simple. The lean startup movement has taught us a great deal about how to limit our risk while bringing a product to market, and the unstated message is to never play it safe.

Photo: Gregory Taylor

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Five Tips To Improve Employee Performance Reviews Ross | December 21st, 2011

Dilbert.com

Last week, Mike wrote about Small Business and Startups: End-of-Year Mishegoss, 2011 Version. In that post, he briefly mentioned that the end of the calendar year is a good time to conduct employee reviews.

I’m not a fan of end-of-year employee reviews. If you waited until the end of the year to give feedback to your employees, you failed. But, when done properly, year-end employee reviews can serve an important purpose.

Here are five tips to help you improve your employee performance reviews.

1. Never wait until the end of the year – provide constructive feedback regularly. You should be providing regular constructive feedback to your team – and each employee you supervise throughout the year – on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. I am not suggesting you set up regular meetings for such reviews. Make your reviews and constructive feedback informal, low key, and regular. The measure I use for myself: does each person on my team know how I feel about their work during the prior week? If I can’t answer that question, I failed.

If an employee isn’t contributing, fire them after giving them an opportunity to improve. Don’t wait until the end-of-year reviews – you’ll only make yourself and your team miserable.

2. Take time to prepare for each review and require each employee to prepare. If you’re going to invest your own time and your employee’s time for an end-of-year review, make sure you both prepare. Take the time to identify three to four strengths and three to four areas for improvement. Make sure you’ve identified concrete examples for each so that you can go into more detail when appropriate.

Also make sure your employees know in advance that you’ll ask them to talk about strengths and areas for improvement. No employee is perfect. No person is perfect. We all can improve – and it’s your job to help your employees identify areas for improvement.

3. Be brutally honest. I’ve seen too many people afraid to speak their mind at review time. That’s not surprising – we’re typically not even honest with ourselves – how can we be honest with others. But when it comes to reviews, candor is critical – and should work both ways.

But be careful not to make the review only about mistakes. You want each employee to walk away more motivated and excited about their job – talking only about mistakes and problem areas will not accomplish that goal.

4. Stay human. Fight the temptation to spend the time reviewing graphs filled with data or reading from a form. Review time is a time to talk. If you want people on your team to feel like human beings, treat them as human beings.

5. Listen more than you talk. Far too many people think review time is a time to talk. It’s not. Review time is a time to listen. The conversation should always be two-way. Invite your employees to talk about their accomplishments and struggles. Invite them to talk about their work and personal goals for the coming year. Ask them if they’re happy with the work they’re doing and the people around them (you’d be surprised how many people are afraid to ask this question). Ask them how you can do better.

What other tips can you add that can help improve employee performance reviews?