Teamphoria Provides 8 Tips for Painless Performance Reviews

We’re starting our annual reviews here at Teamphoria, which got us thinking about what makes a good performance review! While we were preparing for ours, we wanted to share our strategies to get through performance review season.

Here are eight tips to make performance reviews less painful, more efficient, so you can actually use them.

Start Early

If you procrastinate, or let your review take a backseat to other projects, chances are that it won’t be as well done as it could have been. So, set some time aside to work on it before the last minute. So you’re not stressed and proofread it before the deadline.

Review Yourself Often

It helps to write a little bit every day. We’ve found that it’s best if you make a note every day about how you feel you did. Realistically though, reflect after big projects, milestones, or setbacks. How did you do? What could you have done better? What do you want to do again? Keep track of these in a document so that around review time, you can make the most of your reflection.

Ask for Help!

If you only review yourself once a year, don’t be afraid to ask questions! Ask about what the review means in your organization. Does it inform what your pay increase may be? Does it go into positions or what projects you work on? It’s always important to know what is dependent on the review before you criticize yourself too leniently or too harshly.

Get Some Outside Perspective

If you have someone you trust on your team, ask them to frankly tell you how you’ve done. Is there anything you could improve on? How are your interpersonal relationships? If you come across as too familiar or too distant, that’s important to know when you’re planning the year ahead and setting your goals.

Take a Holistic View

An annual review is meant to look at your entire year, not just your last week or month. So If you are working on a new project that has you frustrated or is especially challenging, don’t forget about the work you knocked out of the park. If you forget about what you’ve done all year, chances are your managers or reviewers may have forgotten, too.

Find Out What’s Expected

Finding out how you are supposed to measure your successes is an important key to making your review great. Are you reviewing yourself and how you feel you did, or by how much work you completed? How harshly are you supposed to grade yourself? How long are you supposed to make reviews? Depending on your organization, reviews can be short and sweet or long and reflective. It’s good to know just how deep you are supposed to dive.

Bounce Back from Setbacks

If you do have things you believe you need to work on for the next year, it’s a good place to be frank and acknowledge places you made mistakes. Keep in mind the scope of the mistake — forgetting to brew a new pot of coffee is much different than accidentally replying all to corporate wide email.

Celebrate your successes

The beauty of the review is that you can dig deep and reflect on all the great stuff you did in the past year. Don’t judge yourself too harshly or just dwell on the bad. If there’s a good time to brag, now is the time!

Performance reviews are an important tool for monitoring your professional goals. It’s a great way to take a team member’s temperature when paired with an employee engagement survey. Although these eight tips are just what we try to do before our reviews, whether they’re performance reviews, employee engagement surveys, or just regular check ins!

If you want to learn more about employee engagement and how to make every review in your organization rock, check out what Teamphoria’s employee performance review software can do!

Sign up for Teamphoria’s free performance management software today!

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