I recently had an opportunity to chat with Martin Sinderman to provide my perspective on performance reviews for his article in ChannelPro. I stressed the importance to Martin of changing the execution of performance reviews away from a potentially one-sided and subjective yearly (or longer!) audit by a manager, supervisor, or sometimes someone the employee doesn’t even report to directly. That scenario leaves no opportunity to objectively coach and mentor employees on a regular basis and in real-time to improve their performance towards reaching their goals or KPIs.

What I’m driving at is that waiting a year or longer to give an employee feedback and course correction is just too late – the horse has already left the barn. Instead, I recommend providing staff with quarterly reviews designed to give them the guidance they need more regularly and consistently. This approach provides them the best opportunity for continual improvement, allowing them to qualify for the performance bonuses, benefits, or other incentives you have made available for them to achieve.  

More regular reviews allow employees and their managers opportunities for constructive feedback around shared goals, accountability, and partnership for mutual benefit. They also provide a forum for employees to hold leadership accountable to helping them reach shared goals by delivering promised training, coaching, and incentives to them.

And while the thought of conducting reviews more often might sound unappealing due to time constraints, if they are conducted objectively and focused primarily on actual performance data, they tend to go much faster than yearly reviews. But more importantly than that, they allow more time at the right time to discuss and solve challenges or bottlenecks hampering an employee from achieving their full potential.

The key to ultimate success in conducting these sessions as I’ve described is removing emotion from these meetings. This is done by collecting and evaluating trustworthy data. In the absence of data, these conversations, and perceptions of an employee’s performance and overall value to the organization may end up relying on feelings and emotion – the enemy of objective performance measurement and effective leadership, coaching, and mentorship.

Collecting objective data requires your systems and platforms to be optimized to properly measure and report on an employee’s performance, and the employee must utilize these platforms correctly. For a billable technician, this means they must document all of their time in your PSA or ticketing platform according to your standards, and follow your established procedures during service delivery.

If your platforms aren’t integrated and optimized to leverage automation as much as possible and you haven’t standardized and documented your service delivery processes properly, your team’s morale and performance will suffer. And you should never penalize your staff for performance bottlenecks over which they have no control. This is why it is critically important towards achieving your mutual goals that they are confident in your support in their growth path within your organization and that their performance is being measured objectively.

If you’d like to learn more about my DISC Behavioral Assessments for Hiring and Team-Building, and the services I provide MSPs in this area click here or the button below