Reviews are your way of taking the pulse of your organization: performance reviews to evaluate your employee’s past efforts, and forward-looking talent reviews to consider potential and how individuals fit into your succession plans. In this article, we’ll consider six key ways to approach your talent management review processes, ensuring full alignment with organizational goals.

Organizations have a symbiotic relationship with talent. Knowing both how your people benefit your business as well as understanding how you benefit your people is essential. However, Deloitte recently found that only 43% of workers believe they’re better off for having worked at their current organization.

It remains important to ensure your people are in that 43%, and you’re leaving them with stronger skills, greater employability, better opportunities for advancement, and a heightened connection to purpose. This is alongside ensuring that employees are meeting and exceeding expectations in performance. So let’s look at some of the most important things you can do to ensure that your reviews further your goals and those of your employees.

1) Offer a Transparent Process

Strive to be transparent in how you communicate every aspect of your review process. Keep employees informed about your schedule, letting them know of any major changes from year to year.

Employees shouldn’t be taken by surprise by the content of your evaluations—you should communicate clearly and frequently about the organizational mission and vision, and regularly provide honest and constructive feedback. Your employees should know when reviews—good and bad—are on the horizon, because their performance will have been an ongoing conversation during which both managers and reports have aired their opinions and concerns. Make your assessment rubrics widely available to ensure everyone is on the right page.

It’s similarly beneficial to be open about your succession plans. Have managers discuss succession potential with the high-potential individuals that your planning processes identify, ensure that you want the same outcomes, and agree on the actions necessary to get there. Employees shouldn’t be left in the dark about how to advance. This approach will help you cultivate an environment of trust and clarity beyond this process.

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2) Ensure Your Goals and Plans Are Well Defined

There are probably very few processes that don’t benefit from planning and formalization, but it’s nonetheless important for you to tie your reviews to your organizational goals. This goes for both your goals in initiating the process as well as those your managers set for their employees.

If you’re building a talent review, clearly define the purpose of the review—for example, succession planning, leadership identification, or talent development. Individual goals within a performance review should include career path and skills development objectives.

Remember that well-defined goals don’t mean anything if you don’t follow through on them. Continuously track progress against them and showcase the impact you are having.

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3) Be Realistic

The classic SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goal structure requires your objectives to be both achievable and relevant, and it’s worth remembering to set talent management goals that are similarly realistic. For example, realistic succession planning requires that you validate your plans with the people they concern.

If the role you want to develop an employee towards simply isn’t relevant to their interests, you’ve either got to:

• Reconsider their suitability
• Or work with them to address their concerns

Such realism requires a good working understanding of your relationship with your employees, their objectives and wants, and the other options you can offer.

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4) Be Continuous

Your reviews shouldn’t be a once-a-year effort. Continuous feedback and reviews offer several advantages. They:

• Improve engagement
• Drive employee growth
• Provide real-time insight into employee performance and satisfaction
• Strengthen working relationships

Focus on providing continuous reviews and feedback throughout the year, with periodic check-ins along the way. It can even be helpful to avoid having singular (length, and potentially stressful) performance reviews. You could hold separate meetings for feedback and goals—the time between each session allows for space for both parties to consider everything raised, find inspiration, and consult others in the business.

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5) Ensure You Have the Right Tools in Your Toolbox

Delivering reviews at scale is unrealistic without suitable software—coordinating performance review meeting schedules for thousands of employees is a complex task on its own. However, building a more comprehensive approach that factors in a workforce-wide understanding of available skills, career paths, past performance, and up-to-the-moment reporting only comes with dedicated talent management software.

Whether you operate traditional cycle-based appraisals, continuous feedback, or a combined approach, PeopleFluent Talent Management can help you configure and automate your processes. The full suite provides:

• Performance management
• Succession planning
• Employee development tools

And all these are informed by analytics, allowing you to build better careers and organizational futures.

With PeopleFluent Performance Management, you can stay connected year-round with recurring one-on-ones, on-demand feedback requests, formal evaluations, and 360 multi-review processes that can be embedded into performance reviews or as standalone events. Our talent management suite additionally includes succession planning software helping you simultaneously search for upcoming leaders and identify development activities that help them achieve necessary growth, all while supporting your company-wide objectives.

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6) Avoid Bias in Its Many Forms

Whether conscious or unconscious, bias must be rooted out from your review processes. Organizations must absolutely guard against biases that result from people’s views or unexamined prejudices about certain demographics. For example, a manager may assume that an employee isn’t as capable of a given task, or interested in certain roles because of their age, gender, race, or some other attribute, even when prior performance or qualifications contradict this.

Other, more process-based biases may also be an issue. For example, recency bias—wherein someone may unconsciously favor recent events over historic ones—regularly becomes an issue in employee evaluations. An employee who has otherwise had a great year could get a bad performance review based on the project they had an issue with just prior to a performance review.

Counteracting these biases requires training and data collection. Unconscious bias training, and other courses aimed at preparing managers for the conversation and how to avoid common bias errors, are essential. Performance data, as well as additional human perspectives on employee performance, will help managers counteract their biases with proof and provide clear counterpoints that software and HR can use as the basis for correction.

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