Reimagining Yearly Performance Reviews
How to turn compliance into impact
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Every year, your HR software reminds you about doing those performance reviews. It’s about compliance and legal requirements.
Every year, you ask your team to write up their self-reviews, hoping that they include enough information so you can base your official feedback on what they come up with.
Every year your team members spend a week or longer fretting over what they believe is the most important meeting with you in the entire year.
Every year you agonize over yet another compliance exercise taking away valuable time from your actual work, winging it, yet again.
What if… performance reviews were easy?
Imagine this.
Performance review season rolls around. You open up the document with the meeting notes from your past 1:1s with your team member. On top of that document, you have a quarterly summary with expectations and results, learnings and successes.
You request peer feedback from three other team members to get some additional input, and review the self-review your team member sent over. There are no surprises in there, just a confirmation of how you’ve been working together. You ask ChatGPT to give you a summary of those documents.
In your next 1-1 with the team member, you check the summary together, then sent it over to HR.
Done.
With exception of asking ChatGPT for a summary, that’s how I’ve experienced performance reviews all my life. And that’s not because I love performance reviews. That’s because I’ve created a structure that makes it easy.
And here’s how that looks like.
Cadence, content, conversations
If you are leading a distributed team, you are hopefully already having weekly or biweekly conversations with each team member. And while those meetings may be more on the social side, you should can use them for informal career planning sessions or growth sessions every 3-4 months.
Career planning sessions? Growth sessions? Yes, performance reviews is about career development and personal growth. So if necessary, rebrand the meeting to make it less daunting.
So here’s the input:
Use daily standups or weekly work summaries (hopefully available asyncronously and in writing via Geekbot or a similar tool)
Set a recurring meeting every 3-4 months to talk about learning, development and next steps.
Prime your team members by telling them “Just to let you know: I am repurposing one of our 1-1s per quarter to proactively talk about your growth and career plans. [I’d like to use the attached template to make sure we cover everything]. So if there’s things you want to learn, or celebrate, let’s make sure we oficially include them in that meeting.”
Personally, I then like to use the same template for those conversations that I’ll also use for the “official” performance review.
Why? It helps me to be consistent - and it has the added benefit that the “real” performance reviews suddenly feel like something you are doing regularly anyway. Nothing to worry about, nothing to fear.
Maybe you were doing performance reviews because HR said so.
Going forward, how about you do them to support your team members in their career journey?
And if your team consists of Product Managers and Designers, you can copy and adjust my templates. If you are responsible for other roles, those templates still can serve as inspiration.
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