The end of the year is approaching and that means performance review cycles are going to be coming to a close. While it is not necessarily the most fun process, it is an essential exercise for most companies to ensure there is a standard being observed across teams. Regardless of the company or process maturity, performance reviews can often be a difficult thing to do well because you’re trying to flatten all your direct reports to some similar criteria, while everyone has different skills, experiences, and ways they contribute. To help you along, this article will present a high level overview of concerns.

Understand The General Process

At the beginning of the year, HR should outline the entire process as they see it. There’s certain aspects you want to be paying special attention to:

When are the checkpoints?

How many times of the year will you need to supply feedback to the process? Just once at the end of the year, on a quarterly basis, or monthly? And what kind of information will be collected at each checkpoint? Knowing these things will help you plan appropriate supporting documentation (more on this later).

How mature is the overall process?

Is the process well established or is it in flux? Being established doesn’t mean it’s perfect. However, being in a state of flux typically means there’s more tooling that needs to be done with the process before the business can trust it and make decisions from it. The more nascent the process, the more you need to be looking for flaws (i.e. things that don’t make sense, areas not covered). Alternatively, new growing pains can be introduced if the process is mature but the business becomes more dynamic (perhaps due to a merger/acquisition).

Who is the intended audience?

Almost certainly, HR will be directly consuming these reviews. At some juncture, leadership from the business or your department will likely be involved. And hopefully, those being reviewed will gain access to their reviews at a later time. Knowing who will be involved in the process will help you tailor your comments appropriately. Specifically, you’ll want to figure out who the process is supposed to help. Is it more geared toward helping the business make decisions or give feedback to your direct reports? If the prompts are obviously more helpful to the business than to the reviewee, don’t rely on this process to give feedback. After all, given your position, you are more well suited to know when and how you should be giving feedback directly to your direct reports.

Prepare All Throughout the Year

It’s fairly ubiquitous for performance reviews to have a big submission at the end of the year. But the work for doing your reviews starts much earlier than that. If your process doesn’t already have some mandated cadence of check-ins, you should be doing so yourself.

PRO TIP: Don’t start thinking about performance reviews right before they are due.

Check-in cadence notwithstanding, what will be answered on the reviews are things you should be paying attention to throughout the year. The less frequent the checkpoints are, the less likely you are to remember performance with clarity. To combat this, you will want to keep good records of significant events for each team member. That may include keeping track of attendance, surprising outcomes, notable performance completing some work, etc. If possible, link to company resources (e.g. work items, tickets, documents, etc.) in your notes for reference. You should keep track of such things as long as they can be used to answer questions about performing. You may or may not know what the review prompts look like at the beginning of the cycle. So the question you must ask yourself is, “Am I collecting enough to answer questions about my individual team member’s performance?”

Understand Your Prompt

Understand how the scoring works

What are the areas being scored? Are they goals? Are they competency areas? Is it a series of questions with no clear organization? Are questions responded to with numerical scores? Are they answered with categories (e.g. exceeds/meeting/below expectations)?

Understand the scope

Am I answering in the context of the entire company, the business unit, your department, or the team? Each question or section may be different. And if it’s not explicitly mentioned in your prompt then you will need to ask.

Understand comparison and granularity

Am I rating this person in comparison to the whole company or in relation to people in the company of similar rank/role? If it’s the latter, how similar in rank and role; if you have Site Reliability Engineers and Feature Engineers labeled as “software engineers,” do we compare them in the same pool? What about teams with similar skill but different focus; do we treat maintenance teams of legacy software the same as feature engineering teams working greenfield projects?

Don’t Just Report – Help Grow

Most performance reviews share the results with the reviewees once the cycle is complete. While HR and other stakeholders are interested in the data from these reports so that they may make decisions, it’s arguably more important to provide feedback to your direct reports for their growth. As a manager, it’s your responsibility to arm your team members with information that will aid them in growing their career and skills. Ideally, you should be using 1-on-1 sessions throughout the year to provide advice as you make your observations. Use the performance review as a summary of the most important points and anything outstanding that hasn’t been addressed.

Some Gotchas

Sometimes things are not as clear as they seem

Find out if there are weird, underlying organizational assumptions in play. For example, is the organization trying to fit the data points they receive to a bell curve? You may have the most incredible team filled with super stars, and still receive the feedback, “You can’t rate everyone as exceeding expectations.” (Even if they are, expect to provide proof)

Be aware of how biases affect you

Going over the numerous cognitive biases are beyond the scope of this article. But one that stands out is recency bias, where your recent experiences with someone take greater precedence than older ones. The best way to combat your own biases is to be educated about them and to keep documentation.

Conclusion

Overall, tackling your performance reviews is not usually complicated. But you will be better served by understanding the expectations of your organization. Engage your leadership and HR on the aforementioned points of interest and it should make your life easier and your reviews more balanced.