Performance reviews

Performance reviews… The word alone gives many people the jitters. Over the past twenty years, we’ve seen countless experiments in government and business trying to improve work quality through performance reviews. The idea was to hold up a mirror and “motivate” people to perform better. An accelerated or delayed pay progression was supposed to motivate people to do their best all year long. Often the financial reward was out of proportion to the effort people put in, and comparing colleagues to one another led to demotivation. Without anyone intending it, performance reviews caused a lot of grief and had the opposite effect.

Holding performance reviews is often a mental ordeal for the employee, but also for the manager. After all, what are they supposed to do with the obligation to assess every team member? In many companies, performance reviews end up being treated as a formality. And in quite a few organisations, there are voices calling for their abolition.

Still, we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The intention was to use individual conversations to keep getting better. To address dysfunction, redirect employees and give feedback so they remain motivated contributors in an evolving organisation. In the meantime, we know that people don’t perform better because of a reward-and-punishment culture. When people deliver good work, it’s because they want to.

From the perspective of Nonviolent Communication, we want to breathe new life into performance reviews. Below you’ll find a number of general principles followed by plenty of concrete suggestions for effective reviews.

Attention to employees’ needs

Nonviolent Communication pays attention to the needs of both managers and employees, and provides a language to discuss them. Based on the insight that autonomy, competence and connection are important needs for employees (cf. Self-Determination Theory by Deci & Ryan), we want to encourage managers to also address and care for these needs during performance reviews. An employee who feels good at work will be far more productive and creative.

Steer employees toward results (the “what”) rather than dictating how those results should be achieved. It takes some reframing to arrive at well-defined, achievable goals, but these then give employees considerable autonomy to get on with the work.

For a manager to care for employees’ need for competence, good feedback is crucial. Below you’ll find plenty of suggestions to make sure feedback actually lands and gets taken on board.

Connection, finally, is perhaps the most fundamental need people have, and certainly for employees who spend a large part of their time at work. As a manager, you can foster connection through the way you communicate, while also creating conditions that give the relationships between colleagues a boost.

Suggestions for performance reviews rooted in connection

Before: focus the attention

• Prepare well and schedule enough time (about 45 minutes).
• The following questions can help you and your employee during preparation:
  • What went well this year?
  • What could be improved, in your view?
  • What are your intentions for next year? Do you need support? If so, what kind?
  • What feedback do you have for the organisation?
  • What feedback do you have for your manager? How can your manager help you do your work (better)?

Know that as a manager, you don’t need to agree with what your employee says in response to these questions. These questions allow the employee to share their perspective on the past year and how they want to translate that into the future.

• If helpful, note down the essence of your message per issue so you can deliver it briefly, clearly and completely. For areas of improvement (maximum 3), prepare concrete requests. This serves as a starting point for making concrete agreements.

During: give clear feedback and listen empathically

• As an introduction, you can outline the goals and structure of the conversation. Then work through the conversation in stages:
  • Name what went well in the past year. Let the employee take the lead here. Then add the points you’re satisfied with.
  • Name the areas for improvement and points of attention for next year, based on your observations from the previous year. Here too, invite the employee to raise their issues first.
  • Translate into concrete action points: what will the employee take on, what will you do to support this?
• Give your feedback in a non-judgmental way, keep it professional and stick to the facts. If you do have judgments, first translate them into needs, values and interests. Make sure you close each piece of feedback with a question:
  • How does this land for you?
  • How do you see this?
  • I’m curious how you hear this?
  • I’d like to see that…?
• When you want to address an attitude, meaning a generalisation based on observations, such as customer-friendliness, accuracy, collaboration or friendliness, make sure you can give feedback based on multiple concrete observations. If you don’t have concrete observations and only have second-hand information, it makes sense to go and observe deliberately. Feedback based on direct observation is much more powerful than information based on assumptions, intuitions or hearsay.
• Don’t give feedback about incidents that happened months ago. Those things belong in a corrective conversation as soon as possible after the event.
• Make sure the employee actually hears your message, including the details. So don’t keep talking when the employee is getting defensive. Listen to how they see things and how they feel about it. Know that you can listen actively and empathically while having a completely different opinion. Deliver your message with few words after you’ve listened. By offering empathy, people become more willing to listen afterwards. And when employees feel accepted, they’re often quicker to admit mistakes and look at what they can learn.
• Translate each topic into a clear action point. Note down the action points you want to see turned into agreements beforehand. Make clear whether the content is negotiable in terms of form and execution, or not. Proposals for agreements can start with:
  • I suggest you…
  • I’d like to see a solution for…
  • I’d like to hear how you…
  • I want you to…
  • Next year I want to see that… That’s why I suggest you…

Make sure that for each action point you can see or hear that the employee genuinely wants to commit. Don’t settle for a “sighing yes” or an agreement where the body language tells you the employee is resisting your proposal.

• Ask your employee for feedback on how they experience your management style. Listen and ask follow-up questions about what’s hard to hear, and know that you don’t need to justify yourself and that it’s perfectly fine to have a different opinion.
• End the conversation by repeating the agreements made and by thanking the employee for the conversation. Do this last part authentically, by consciously appreciating the effort the employee has likely put into contributing to the quality of the conversation.

Afterwards: keep the attention sharp

• Write a report of the performance review in which the agreements are recorded.
• Follow up on the agreements by observing deliberately. Also make sure that your own action points are carried out as soon as possible.

In summary

Performance reviews have not always led to motivation and quality work in the past. Intrinsic motivation remains the most important factor in delivering good work. With this insight, we want to give performance reviews new momentum by:

• having a genuine conversation with each other
• giving effective feedback
• steering employees toward results rather than prescribing how those results should be achieved