I Love Performance Reviews - Said No One Ever!

"I Love Performance Reviews ... said no one ever!"

My Job Here is Done™ Transcript (for general use only – machine-generated and it may not be accurate)

Kelli (00:05) It's performance review time. Hello. Where'd everybody go?

Dave (00:11) Wow, you really know how to clear a room.

Kelli (00:14) I'm getting the impression that nobody really likes performance reviews.

Dave (00:19) Thank you very much, Captain Obvious.

Intro (00:26) Hi, I'm Dave and I'm Kelli and this is My Job Here Is Done. If you really want that next promotion or you're a rising star entrepreneur, we have some stories to tell that will absolutely help you. I've been starting and running businesses all my life. And I've worked for the man like a dog for decades. Together we'll share stories, ideas and notions that will help you absolutely soar past that cruiser sitting next to you. And if you're grinding forward with your growing business, we know where the landmines are. Let's find them. Hey, it's only about 20 minutes. What do you have to lose? Nothing … or everything.

Dave (01:11) Well, hello and welcome back. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Dave.

Kelli (01:15) And I'm Kelli and welcome to the podcast. Before we get started, just a quick reminder that you can learn more about the podcast, listen to all the previous episodes, read our bonus blog material, and interact with us at our website. myjobhereisdone.com and on social media at myjobpodcast.

Dave (01:33) This is the one about the most wonderful time of the year.

Kelli (01:38) A Christmas episode?

Dave (01:40) Not quite.

Kelli (01:41) Okay.

Dave (01:42) It's looked forward to by all who ‘love me some good feedback’, treasured by every employee ...kInd of like a paid holiday, but where you have to still come to work.

Kelli (01:52) That doesn't sound like fun.

Dave (01:53) Yeah. It's also anticipated by every leader as a chance to dazzle themselves in front of the team. I'm talking about Performance Review Day.

Kelli (02:04) Everyone hates performance reviews.

Dave (02:06) They do?

Kelli (02:07) Yes, absolutely. The person receiving and giving the feedback both hate the performance review process.

Dave (02:15) Why?

Kelli (02:15) Well, it's an antiquated process. It takes a lot of time and energy to look back over the last twelve months and complete it.

Dave (02:22) Yeah. And it's hard to pass judgment on someone else. It's just not natural for people to do that, and even passing judgment on themselves, that's like a really tough thing.

Kelli (02:32) So what are the common types of reviews being done today? There's a bunch of them out there.

Dave (02:35) There are!  Let's start off with some of the more common ones. Number one, the biography review.

Kelli (02:42) Okay, what's that one?

Dave (02:43) So that's where your manager writes a story about you, like in the room by himself or herself. They just sit there and say, okay, dreaded day, I have to do performance reviews. Let me see if I can write a paragraph about Kelli.

Kelli (02:57) Yeah, I get it. And so there's the employee writing about themselves.

Dave (03:01) This is just the opposite. That's where you sit down on that dreaded day, put your head in your hands and say, I need to write something nice about myself. 

And then there's the one to five review.

Kelli (03:15) The ranking.

Dave (03:15) Yeah, the ranking. You go from either overachiever and Godlike to a sucky, no-good, bottom-feeding loser.

Kelli (03:25) Or somewhere in between.

Dave (03:27) And there are only three other things in between, so there's not a lot of room.

Kelli (03:31) Are there any other ones?

Dave (03:33) Oh, yeah. There's the scoreboard review.

Kelli (03:36) What the heck is that?

Dave (03:38) That's where you're ranked against all the other employees in the group of similar job titles.

Kelli (03:43) Does that happen just in your own business, or is it across the board?

Dave (03:48) It could be across the board. These are all pick and choose. You just pick and choose the performance review kind of type that you want to do. One of my all-time favorites, not, is the ‘I don't know you, but I'll review you review.’ That's where somebody from the outside, like, from another Department is brought in and they start asking you questions about how you felt you did over the period. You feel it's like a murder interrogation or something, and then you're being asked to prove your damn worth. Kind of like a job interview after you already have the job.

Kelli (04:21) That one doesn't sound very effective to me. To have somebody who doesn't even know you, that you just met, give you a review.

Dave (04:28) I know.

Kelli (04:29) And then there's the ‘everybody gets a whack at you review.’ Jump ball.

Dave (04:34) Hey, friends, foes, family, strangers off the street. The hitchhiker guy. Would you fill this form out for me? I'm kind of having a performance review, and at this point, I'm actually questioning my very existence on this planet.

Kelli (04:49) Sure. What's your name again?

Dave (04:52) Let's discuss and dissect a few of these things. But first, just like we pointed out in the episode Toss This Salad Out, where we broke down the failures in the current interviewing process, where interviewers are not trained well or at all, the review processing companies is even more haphazard, in our opinion.

Kelli (05:11) Rarely is there a formal training program for managers to go through to help teach them effective, fair, constructive employee review techniques. As a result, that needed practice employee reviewing is nearly 100% of the time, a giant mess with no good results.

Dave (05:29) More about that in a moment. We have some ideas to share with you, but let's get back to breaking down the different types of these sucky reviews.

Kelli (05:36) Okay, good idea.

Dave (05:36) Let's start with the everyone gets a whack at you review. This is also known as the peer review or the 360 reviews.

Kelli (05:43) So in my opinion, peer reviews do not provide value. Employees will only request a peer review from colleagues they know are going to respond positively. Sometimes they even make a deal, you send me yours and I'll send you mine.

Dave (05:59) These are like passing notes in school.

Kelli (06:01) Exactly.

Dave (06:02) Another way it's done is by someone observing you for a few days. They only see a snapshot of your work, but they're offering an opinion.

Kelli (06:11) I guess they look at it, and when I say they I mean, the business, as an objective, impartial kind of outsider.

Dave (06:21) Yeah. Unfortunately, it ends up being pretty much just bullshit and random words on a piece of paper.

Kelli (06:26) I don't like that one.

Dave (06:27) There’s the formal self-review.

Kelli (06:29) Well, that's difficult and takes a lot of time. You have to reconstruct everything you've accomplished over the past year or whatever period.

Dave (06:36) It is.

Kelli (06:37) Right.

Dave (06:37) And natural tendencies are to be at either extreme, right?

Kelli (06:41) Yeah.

Dave (06:42) You give yourself really glowing reviews or you're too critical of yourself. It can cause an argument. It's embarrassing. It can be awkward. Because when you present that to your manager, that person is kind of challenging you.

Kelli (06:58) They may disagree with one of your ratings you gave yourself, and then you feel kind of like, oh, yeah.

Dave (07:03) And you may not feel that way.

Kelli (07:05) But I'm talking about me.

Dave (07:07) Yeah, exactly. The manager review. This is the one where the manager sits down, writes a review about you.

Kelli (07:15) That's one way communication, often very ineffective because people generally find it hard to cast any feedback on another person.

Dave (07:24) Managers and leaders don't really like to write things that are critical of people in words. They'd rather have a conversation and use their own inflection and technique to try to get that point across.

Kelli (07:39) There's no T at the end of across.

Dave (07:41) What do you mean there's no T at the end of across..

Kelli (07:43) You say acrosst.  Always

Dave (07:48) I say acrosst?

Kelli (07:49) Yes.

Dave (07:50) I should not use the T because there's no T in there, no T in across.

Kelli (07:55) You're welcome.

Dave (07:56) For the manager, it takes time to write a unique story about each employee. They're usually very short and broad in general as a result of this. And it's one of the worst wastes of time that I can think of. This type of review and the ensuing conversations are all to check a box. No one wins.

Kelli (08:13) Then there's the scale of one to five review or the employee rating review.

Dave (08:18) Yeah, these are way too broad. I don't like these at all.

Kelli (08:21) You're lumped into a wide net and it's very biased by, like/not like.

Dave (08:27) Exactly. It doesn't account for employee growth. Instead, it just looks at a snapshot in time. Which brings us to the scoreboard review. Otherwise known as the roster review.

Kelli (08:38) So the theory is that you're part of a group of people who are average. Now plug you into that group. Are you above average at a four to five, average at a three, or below average at a one to two?

Dave (08:50) What an awful message to send. I mean, it's literally like going back to grade school and maybe you're the one that's put in the gifted class.

Kelli (08:58) Yeah. You know what happens to those kids, right?

Dave (09:00) They get beat up just for fun. Or maybe you're not quite ready. So you've held back a grade and you know what happens to them, right? Oh, yeah. Those kids are the ones that are beating up the gifted class kids.

Kelli (09:12) Yeah.

Dave (09:13) The people at average, they're fine.

Kelli (09:15) They're just kind of cruising.

Dave (09:17) There is no problem. That's cool.

Kelli (09:19) So once again, this method is very common simply because it's easy to accomplish, a box checker. Yeah, but it's fraught with bias.

Dave (09:27) So what is the purpose of a scheduled performance review anyway?

Kelli (09:32) Seriously, is there a plan around this or just to check a box?

Dave (09:36) Usually it's to check a box. Sometimes people think it's to get a raise.

Kelli (09:40) No, that's a different process.

Dave (09:43) I agree. Or performance reviews are used to manage out a poor performer.

Kelli (09:49) That's different, too. 

Dave (09:50) That's not what a performance review is for. That's what a performance improvement plan is for. There's a huge difference between the two.

Kelli (09:57) Right. And that's another podcast. 

Dave (09:59) But until then, noodle on that a little bit. Is it used to keep track of goals?

Kelli (10:04) Yes, maybe.

Dave (10:06) So let's briefly touch on that – goals - and we have an upcoming episode on goals that we think you'll find interesting as well. But briefly, goals are great.

Kelli (10:17) They're needed.

Dave (10:18) We love them.

Kelli (10:18) They drive productivity, quality, and most importantly, self or personal satisfaction.

Dave (10:25) Absolutely. But goals are often, and I mean very often, way too big.

Kelli (10:30) They're often not real goals, but goals disguised as tasks.

Dave (10:34) Right. So here's an example. This is a real goal. Finish the year at a $1 million in revenue target. Clear, crisp statement. A task masquerading as a goal would be: contribute enough leads to reach the corporate yearly goal.

Kelli (10:52) Ill-defined. Hard to measure, no clear goal.

Dave (10:55) Exactly. A better substitute for that task would be a measurable goal. Finish the year with a 5% increase in Marketing's KPIs versus last year.

Kelli (11:06) Yeah. That rewritten goal gives the employee more flexibility, more chance to use their experience, their imagination, team skills, right?

Dave (11:16) Yes. And it also promotes more conversations and check-ins with the leader, which is the ultimate goal here.

Kelli (11:24) Yes. The ultimate goal of the performance review is to learn about your team and staff and how effective they are to the business.

Dave (11:31) Yep, that's it. Yay.

Kelli (11:34) So we agree - scheduled performance reviews suck. They're not effective. So why are they always scheduled and dreaded by all?

Dave (11:42) Well, first, it's because most businesses are not thinking about the effects, positive or negative, of these reviews. They just know that page five of the rulebook of business says you need to do them, so we do them.

Kelli (11:55) And why hard schedules. Why would you wait until the end of the year, the end of the month, or a certain date to have a formal review?

Dave (12:03) Well, one reason is that hard scheduling of performance reviews at a certain time keeps them trackable.

Kelli (12:09) But that's a horrible reason. 

Dave (12:11) It means that you have to be reminded to review employees.

Kelli (12:15) As a manager, you should be doing that all the time in your own way based on your own needs. It's part of leadership. It's not a bolt-on thing.

Dave (12:23) It is not. Scheduling causes angst and a definite drop in productivity during the process because everybody has just got their hair on fire. They are scrambling to get it done. And I've never met one person who looks forward to it.

Kelli (12:37) Except maybe the performance consultant.

Dave (12:40) I was just going to say that, yeah, you hire the performance consultant to come in and that person carrying the briefcase for 30 days and $30,000 is absolutely there to make sure that the performance review gets done and they're excited about it.

Kelli (12:55) Heck yeah. They've got dollar signs in their eyes

Dave (12:55) As your employees are Googling preparing for the performance review and they get clues that they need to fake it through those structured types that we mentioned above. And is that really what you want your team to be concentrating on?

Kelli (13:09) Don't they have anything else to do?

Dave (13:11) I don't think so.

Kelli (13:11) I think they may.

Dave (13:13) So it's time to ask the question, what should a performance review be? And the answer is, any performance review should end in a mutual agreement. Period. It's just that simple.

Kelli (13:26) It should be nothing more than a simple agreement that you and your employee are happy and satisfied with the progress being made so far.

Dave (13:34) Right. You can include coaching sessions within that time. You can certainly help in developing core competencies. To praise and find to add some correction. So I have a question for you, Kelli.

Kelli (13:46) Okay. What is it?

Dave (13:47) Is the following statement true? All the good you might have done yesterday doesn't matter one bit. It's what have you done for me today?

Kelli (13:57) Absolutely, it's true.

Dave (13:59) Do you see everybody wincing?

Kelli (14:01) Yeah, I don't know about that. 

Dave (14:05) Those sounds that you're making, pull up your big boy pants because you need to open up your mind for a minute and listen to this. You were thanked, or not, for what you did yesterday already. It's history. It's behind you. You can't go back and change a damn thing.

Kelli (14:22) Yesterday doesn't count anymore.

Dave (14:24) Take off your rear-view mirror and look at the damn road you're on. There are corners to navigate. Stupid deer to avoid.

Kelli (14:32) Stupid deer?

Dave (14:34) Yeah, stupid deer.

Kelli (14:35) Well, tell us what the stupid deer analogy is quickly.

Dave (14:38) Oh, this is easy. You know a stupid deer from a smart deer every time you see them lying dead on the side of the road. So those are the ones that come running out of the field. They're not thinking and boom, right into the front of your car, dead on the road.

Kelli (14:54) Yeah, it's not good.

Dave (14:55) All the smart ones, the majority, they're all in the field. They're eating their little berries and they're having their little love affairs to make babies with other cute deer. And they're living their deer lives. They're not the stupid deer. Don't be a stupid deer.

Kelli (15:11) So what does stupid deer have anything to do with this?

Dave (15:14) It means as you're navigating, you're looking at the front instead of looking out the back because history is done. You want to avoid things like stupid deer, those tight corners in the roads. You need to have your eyes and your mind focused on going forward. That's what's important.

Kelli (15:30) Pay attention. Okay. Now that we've completely trashed them, here's a better way. What we call the always be reviewing review. To do this, you need a couple of tools.

Dave (15:41) Yeah. First, you need to make and take quick notes that are associated with an employee. So you need a tool to do that. Your choice here. Paper ledger, daytimer.

Kelli (15:51) Daytimer?

Dave (15:53) I don't know why I said that. There are about five people that are going to know what a daytimer is, right? Google it, folks.

Kelli (16:01) Maybe you want to take a note on your BlackBerry, too.

Dave (16:06) You can use Microsoft OneNote, Google Docs. There are a million answers out there. Just pick one.

Kelli (16:10) You also need to understand any rules of engagement that you may have to follow, such as those found in collective bargaining agreements or employment contracts if they're used or state, country, territory laws.

Dave (16:23) Just like employment interview laws. You have to be careful on this. And that screams training.

Kelli (16:29) And, you know, just FYI, in the United States, employee performance reviews are not mandatory according to the US Department of labor, but the Civil Rights Act and EEOC laws do govern what you can and cannot use from employee reviews. So, again, get some training.

Dave (16:44) Yes, training is just crucially important. You also need to set clear performance expectations and establish accountability. This is extremely important because it goes to measure the performance.

Kelli (16:57) And you need to inform your employees on how you like to do reviews so they're always thinking about their performance and contribution to the team.

Dave (17:05) And I'll give you an example of how I've done this in the past, and for me, this has been effective. Maybe you'll do a modification of this or your own way, but I think that making a clear message is important. I like to say something like, I don't like formal reviews because they tend to be a moment in time. I prefer to do regular check-ins on how goals are proceeding and discuss our ongoing strategy. I also prefer if you come to me when you see things that interfere with your goals or work. Now, I'll let you know that you'll probably see me taking notes when we're in kind of like a one on one discussing this. But don't let that be a sign of anything bad. I'm just keeping track so I can be as helpful as I can getting us to the finish line.

Kelli (17:43) That's really a solid message. 

Dave (17:45) And I try to do that because I want people to feel as if this is open, transparent, and one on one. I also have another formality that I throw in. And this kind of shocks people. I say at some point along the course of the year, I'm going to ask you to review me, and I know I can do better. And we should always have a policy with each other that I'm not trying to necessarily be your boss per se. I'm simply the lucky one right now that gets to lead the team and help with your professional development.

Kelli (18:14) Well, you just like threw that right on its head because employees are used to their employers or their managers or leader to be reviewed by their leader, their manager over them.

Dave (18:26) Right.

Kelli (18:27) So for you to turn it around and say, you as the employee who reports to me, I want you to give me some feedback about my performance.

Dave (18:35) I'm telling you, if you just do that, you're going to see so much more communication. And really, that's the goal here. You want to just communicate better because there should be no surprises.

Kelli (18:47) And you know, in my opinion, to have good communication, you have to have some sort of relationship. And I think you lower that anxiety level when you say, hey, I'm a person just like you. You tell me what I'm doing, right or wrong or good or bad or what you value or don't.

Dave (19:03) That's it. The message here is to talk to people more often. By doing that, they'll feel at ease to come to you more often, and they'll come to you more often than you can imagine. With this technique, you'll also learn about their strengths and weaknesses. You'll give them feedback, you'll get feedback, and it will all be in real-time. There won't be any scheduling necessary, and there are no glaring course corrections needed. You'll get the opportunity to make little tiny corrections, nothing that's going to cause people to feel as if they're going into shock and awe. It'll be really natural. There are no surprises. There are less hard feelings, less personal angst. It will result in much better results on the company goals.

Kelli (19:46) Let's change the old antiquated and tired employee review process by trying some of the tips and suggestions we offered here. We'd love to hear your feedback. Leave us comments on how you make performance reviews work for you.

Dave (20:00) So there it is. Fast, fun, and done. Thank you very much for listening today.

Kelli (20:04) If you like our podcast, please tell a friend about us. Just one friend or colleague that you think would enjoy the content and stories we share.

Dave (20:12) You can listen to My Job Here Is Done anywhere and everywhere podcasts are available, and for the latest info and how you can work with us.

Kelli (20:20) Check out our website. It's easy. myjobhereisdone.com.

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