The Elements of a Constructive Performance Review During the Pandemic

The pandemic and the growth of remote work has changed a lot about how we do things, and that includes performance reviews. Even as many people return to the office, some of these changes will naturally stick around.

The pandemic and post-pandemic performance review will be different, altered by the lessons learned from the recent and ongoing disruption. The elevated amount of stress many are facing means that performance reviews have to be conducted more carefully than they once were.

Managers need to think carefully about how they handle reviews. With the current high turnover, it's more important than ever to keep your good employees happy. However, coming up with a better, less stressful system for performance reviews helps everyone and improves engagement and productivity.

Here are some things to help make performance reviews less stressful, more constructive, and more useful.

Make Human-Centered Reviews

Presenting performance reviews as a one-on-one conversation between managers and employees helps convey necessary information concisely and allows you to frame the message to each person. As companies are collectives of people, treating each other as people helps strengthen those bonds. Younger employees tend to appreciate more back and forth and the opportunity to talk about how their supervisor can better support them.

One-on-one, conversational reviews have the benefit of allowing for feedback in both directions and talk through the issues (and positives) to develop an improvement plan immediately. Ensuring that performance reviews contain positive elements as well is also key to maintaining employee engagement.

Forego Yearly Reviews for Periodic Reviews

Many of the issues covered in annual reviews respond to issues that occurred months beforehand. Some of the issues that come up may already have been addressed, or needed to be addressed but haven’t and only gotten worse.

Instead, check-in with employees at least quarterly, if not monthly, or implement a mechanism for expressing concerns between reviews, in both directions. Improved communication helps employees improve faster, making them more productive. It avoids the issue of a problem being ignored until it becomes serious and can thus reduce turnover.

If you have a system of annual performance bonuses, consider changing that to smaller checks or perks through the year, which can also prevent the phenomenon of people working extra hard in "bonus season" and hoping recency bias will make you fail to notice. Raises beyond the cost of living can be based on records kept throughout the year, not one event. That improves equity and ensures that somebody going through a family crisis when annual reviews occur does not face repercussions for a brief blip in performance.

Adapt to Changing Trends

The world is rapidly changing and failing to adapt will leave you behind, including how you handle your review process and employees in general.

If you are changing your review process, understand that it is an ongoing process. Continually evaluate your review process to ensure it positively impacts your company culture and accommodates unique work schedules and remote work. Be ready to learn not just from your mistakes but from what others might be doing.

Be flexible and humble, if a process is not working it is far better to admit so quickly and fix it before it becomes ingrained in your institutional inertia. It's very easy to become static, and that gets in the way of everyone's development and improvement.

Furthermore, things have yet to fully settle down. If you recently transitioned to a more remote or hybrid work environment, then you need to consider things such as fairness in communication between workers who are in the office and those working entirely remotely. The pandemic has also led to changes in work processes which may become lasting. Being flexible and being willing to experiment with different things and set them aside if they don't work will help your company move beyond this. Make sure to listen to employees about new procedures and accept their feedback so you can refine things further and quickly resolve things before they become an issue.

Performance reviews are, of course, vital. However, the traditional way of doing them no longer fits today's mobile workforce, the needs of younger worker's or even the needs of employers. Additionally, in these highly stressful times, everyone needs a little bit more attention to thrive.

If your HR department is struggling to find time to handle all these things, you may benefit from outsourcing to a professional employer organization. Let the PEO handle routine things such as benefits administration and payroll, so you have the time to design improved performance review systems and develop a better company culture.