Posts Tagged ‘employee’

Five Tips To Improve Employee Performance Reviews

Wednesday, 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?

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How small businesses can manage people for competitive advantage

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Thinking about the health-care debate has caused me to reflect on our own approach to our team has given me a chance to consider some ways in which we add value to our own venture, create a stronger company, and (hopefully) achieve a real competitive advantage.

When Ross and I started crowdSPRING, we were determined to hire the best people we could find, treat them fairly, allow them to grow into their jobs, and share with them the responsibility for building our community and our business. Among our priorities was to provide a package of benefits which would communicate not just our commitment to the folks we hired, but also the values we held. The health care benefits we provide to our workers and their families are just one way in which we try to make the team feel valued and secure.

It shouldn’t stop at health care benefits; all aspects of human resource management should be considered and thoughtful policies established. Business owners should carefully apply several “levers” which, when operated effectively, can have a huge impact on a company’s vitality and sustainability. Among the strategies to consider to build a strong team are: recruiting, development, reward, empowerment, job/team design, and modeling. These levers, when implemented with clarity, transparency, and integrity, can give a business a sustained advantage in a competitive landscape and create an environment of trust, learning, and growth. We believe that it is our responsibility to create such an environment, and we also believe that, by doing so, businesses can directly benefit.

RECRUITING: Take the time to develop a detailed job description, distribute it through the correct networks, and post it in the appropriate forums. How you talk about your company and the job you’re trying to fill, will go a long way to attract suitable applicants, and will also help you to screen those to uncover the best fit and the most promising candidates. In writing these descriptions, we try very hard to use language and a voice which reflects our own values and the “flavor” of our company and this also helps to attract strong applicants.

EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT: We are life-long learners and committed to our own ongoing educations in business and in life, and we hire for this quality. But it’s not enough to just employ people who share this value. When we hire someone, we make a commitment that we will help them to develop new skills; allow them to take on new responsibility; and  empower them to share their own knowledge to help other team members. We encourage them to pursue other avenues of creativity away from their jobs, and to communicate to us ways in which they can grow for their own benefit and the benefit of our venture.

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