Performance reviews can help you to invest in and retain the right people but always be improved by reviewing, tweaking and improving components.
Firstly, congratulations on already having a Performance Management Process set up and running and I’m sure you’re already seeing the benefits.
As we know, performance management processes, including individual reviews, have the potential to foster the growth, development, and engagement of your people. We also know that when done well, reviews can help you to invest in and retain the right people. And we know that like all systems and processes, they can also be improved with some reviewing and tweaking over time.
In this post, we’re focusing on improving and further developing the questions you may want to ask throughout your process.
Performance Review focus areas & questions
The challenge for all of the areas in which you might want to focus on in your performance review process is to make them short enough so they’re achievable – yet useful enough so that both you and your team members can see a tangible benefit from the time spent.
Set specific goals for each quarter with the aim to reach yearly practice targets
- Team Efficiencies – what can we do better?
- Client spend – do we want to see them more often or to take up more of our services?
- Pet Compliance – how aligned are they with our key recommendations for each life stage?
Staff retention strategies
- Discuss how to ensure wellness standards: lunch breaks, record and abide by a maximum number of hours per week for all roles
- Review induction/training process. Does the employee feel their individual goals have been supported?
- Review their involvement in well-being activities and/or training
Team member growth acceleration
- How can you accelerate the growth of your team member?
- Set proactive targets and discuss the individual strengths you see in that person
- Create individual development plans that include set time frames for follow-up conversations
- Clearly identify what ‘success’ looks like for each of the goals and the individual team member
- Collaboratively agree on how to celebrate individual wins
- Discuss future career path options
Transparent, consistent, and objective way to determine wage increases
- Separate this conversation from other review conversations
- Create set objective criteria based on 3 measures:
- Practice profitability
- Technical skills and reaching individual goals &
- Teamwork/behaviour/value alignment
- Schedule regular updates with your employees so there is no surprise when discussing what the outcome of the wage conversation will be
- Set skills and behaviours for each level within a role and associated wage range
Increase performance on all levels
- Question, understand and measure what drives individual, role, team, and practice performance
- Identify skill gaps within individuals, roles, teams, and the entire practice
- Discuss a 12-month training, meeting and review program with set themes and agendas to decrease the gaps
By doing some homework before the review process and asking more targeted questions, practices have been able to systematically work through the topics listed above to focus on and monitor improvements for particular areas. This in turn, leads to measurable successes and a team that understands the purpose of your ‘chats’.
