Employee performance management is a critical process that has a significant impact on a company’s overall performance. In this article, we will explore how Teamspective's 360 Feedback can help measure performance in a less-biased and more forwarded looking way.
For a more holistic read on performance management culture, please have a look at our blog post: https://teamspective.com/blog/creating-a-culture-of-performance-elements-of-a-good-employee-performance-management-process/
Contents:
Challenges with measuring performance
Asking a manager or peer to formally review their colleague has been a standard way to collect performance related data. However, there are a few big mistakes that have been made:
Idiosyncratic rater effect
When employees are asked to assess their colleague based on skills, traits or competencies, they effectively rate themselves into the review they are making. According to studies, up to 62% of variance in the ratings are based on the evaluator and not the person who is being evaluated. This is called the idiosyncratic rater effect and this produces low data quality when trying to measure work performance.
Extensive review forms
In the search for a "perfect review form", the solution has always been to ask more questions. The assumption has been that the more perspectives we gather on an individual the more holistic the performance measure will be. However, this has actually not worked and has led to review forms being "over-engineered". Moreover, the longer the form is the more time and resources it will take to fill it out.
Measuring performance 1 or 2 times a year
Mostly due to the overly engineered review forms, it has been impossible to run performance review rounds more frequently. The ask has been way to heavy for employees and team leads, and managing the rounds is too big of a task for HR. However, this has had a huge, negative impact on data quality: when assessing someone's performance after 6-11 months, you will be heavily impacted by recency bias and the events of the past 1-2 months will take center stage in your assessment.
Effectively, during the last decades we have been...
1) maximising the time we use to gather...
2) information which can not be trusted.
Solutions to overcome challenges
It's clear that we want to optimise the return on investment we gain from measuring employee work performance. It doesn't make sense that we waste employee resources on a process which actually doesn't lead to improvements that would be fair towards the employee or beneficial for the business. This includes finding solutions to these areas of optimisation:
minimize the time and effort used to gather the data
maximize the data quality
maximize the actionability of the performance measure
maximise the amount of time and energy available for aligning performance related expectations via conversation
In regards to the challenges stated earlier, a couple of concrete solutions stand out:
Focus on intent
Asking employees to share their intent of future actions when working with a colleague produces much more reliable results. For example, asking a team leader what they would do with a team member next is much more forward looking and actionable than asking what they think about an individual.
Challenge the evaluator
Crafting difficult questions really challenges the evaluator to think and thus creates variance in the responses. This leads to higher data quality and something which is also fair for the individual. For example, not giving endless options so that the evaluator can select the easy response but rather choosing to go with a binary question instead: "Is this person at risk of low performance?" or "Is this person ready for a more challenging role?" are good examples.
Minimize the amount of questions
Points 1 and 2 above allow us to refine the questions and form a concise set instead of a battery of every possible question we can think of. We acknowledge that the best way to gain the most accurate context behind performance and it's expectations is via direct conversation. Thus the goal of the review is to produce triggers instead of truths. If an individuals review scores start to decrease, we know that we need to have a discussion regarding expectations and performance. If review scores are climbing higher, we should discuss new, more challenging opportunities.
Increase the frequency of data collection
Once a lean and effective performance measurement process and tool has been put in place, you can start to increase the frequency of rounds. What are the natural working cycles for each team? Does a developer team work in 2 or 4 week cycles? Does the sales team work in a quarterly cycle? The end of a cycle is a perfect place to document a performance review because work as just been completed and expectations can be aligned for the next cycle.
Teamspective's 360 Feedback
Here is a list of highlights from the 360 Feedback product and how we have integrated the previously discussed solutions into the tool:
Our default questions are scale questions that challenge the reviewer and are quick to answer.
The Overview page highlights how employees differ in the reviews they have received and should trigger different types of conversations with their manager or coach.
Responding directly in Slack / Teams makes it as easy as possible for the individual employee to share their response.
4. The 360 view of collecting feedback makes it possible to gather data in every situation: whether its a lonely consultant working directly with a customer, or a bigger team co-lead by 2 managers.
