Talent management means helping your workforce develop to their full potential, but most employees loathe formal performance conversations. Still, appraisals are a vital part of enhancing everyone’s skills. In this blog post, you will learn three steps to help you change perceptions about the annual review process.

They’re not the most popular aspect of any organization, but performance reviews directly impact your most important asset: the people working to move your business forward. Despite the negative or apathetic feelings some employees have about the process, performance conversations present significant opportunities for your managers to engage with their direct reports and offer constructive feedback.

Nobody wants to feel judged at work, and the thought of being critiqued or potentially receiving negative feedback can make employees feel anxious and dread the very idea of a performance conversation. That’s why whether your organization conducts annual or continuous assessments, one of the biggest hurdles you’ll face is changing the narrative surrounding performance reviews. How your organization frames performance appraisals will impact how your workforce responds throughout the process.

Step 1) Connect Appraisals to Organizational Goals

It’s helpful to clearly define performance standards for your employees before the official review period begins. Your managers need to ensure that their subordinates understand their roles’ key performance indicators (KPIs) and what actions they must take to be successful.

Your organizational leaders need to have systems in place to support managers in communicating those KPIs with their direct reports. It’s also important to ensure each employee understands what skills they need to hone to meet your organization’s expectations. If employees don’t know how their performance will be measured or understand the skills they need to thrive, then they can’t reasonably be expected to meet (let alone exceed) performance expectations during their annual review.

Connecting annual appraisals with organizational goals will also help change employees’ perceptions of the review process. When employees are focused on their specific contributions but don’t clearly understand where your organization is heading, it’s easy for them to see performance reviews as wasted time.

To avoid that “just another HR checkbox” mentality, it’s essential to have clear, consistent messaging about your company’s goals and the steps required to achieve those objectives. Everyone in your organization should understand how their roles and responsibilities directly contribute to company-wide achievements. They also need to know how they’ll be directly impacted when your organization reaches its goals.

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Step 2) Define the Direct Benefits to Employees

Working toward a collective goal is great, but it’s hard to beat human nature. People want to understand the why behind directives, and participation in performance reviews is no different. Outlining the specific impacts that your appraisal process has on employees as individuals can go a long way in positively changing attitudes and perceptions about your performance reviews.

Your employees need to understand that the review process isn’t meant to be negative or stressful. Rather, it’s a chance for them to have meaningful conversations with their supervisors about what’s working, where they can grow, and the steps they can take to find continued success.

Performance reviews present an opportunity for employees and managers to collaborate on career objectives, especially since 41% of HR professionals agree that managers are good at helping employees set goals. Managers play a critical role in guiding their subordinates’ career development. They understand your employees’ strengths and weaknesses as well as how those skills fit more broadly into their department and the overall organization. With the proper tools and support, your managers can use their insights to help employees align their professional goals with your company’s strategic plans.

Employees and managers can also use insights from the performance review as a springboard for conversations about future advancement opportunities. Robust talent management software can be used to generate career paths based on an employee’s available data in the system, such as their current position at your organization and feedback from their performance reviews.

Let’s say your organization uses a 360 performance assessment model, so your employees get feedback from their manager and two or three peers. If the employee being evaluated works with these peers consistently but only interacts with their manager a few times each week, then it’s highly likely that their peers and manager will observe different skillsets. During the performance review, the peers might highlight soft skills like communication and problem-solving, while the manager might emphasize an improvement in the employee’s coding skills. When documented with talent management software, all of that performance feedback can be incorporated into future succession plans and career conversations.

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Step 3) Get Executive Buy-In

No matter how hard you try to get your employees and managers to embrace the annual review process, you’ll always be fighting an uphill battle without support from your senior leadership team. Research indicates that executives might not see the value of performance management and annual review cycles:

• Only 13% of top organizational leaders viewed performance management as crucial to their overall business performance.
• 34% called performance management a “necessary evil.”
• 6% viewed performance management as an unnecessary waste of time.

Successful performance management initiatives rely on consistent communication from the top down. If your senior leadership team doesn’t value your performance management practices, then you’ll need to help them understand the impact these review cycles have on your organization.

A structured performance review process does more than just promote dialogue between employees and managers. Documenting feedback from multiple sources gives your leaders a holistic view of employee performance. Demonstrate to your executive team how performance management software makes it easy to track the strengths, weaknesses, and skills that exist among individuals, departments, and throughout your organization as a whole. You can then leverage the skills and performance data to:

• Determine how best to deploy your talent to bridge skills gaps in your organization.
• Assess which employees are potential flight risks and take steps to implement a retention strategy.
• Mitigate the impact of potential talent loss.
• Determine which employees show potential for advancement and inform your succession plans.

Senior leaders will naturally be concerned about your company’s bottom line. Show them how performance reviews can also play a role in your organization’s compensation planning strategy. You can use employee performance metrics as a standard for awarding pay raises or bonuses. Connecting performance metrics with compensation awards incentivizes your employees to perform well and strive to achieve both their personal goals and your company objectives. Just ensure your performance expectations are clear to all employees, and give them a reasonable amount of time to meet those objectives.