Performance Reviews Your Employees Will Love To Get

Is inflicting annual performance evaluations on your employees or direct reports part of your job description? Would you like to wake-up from this recurring workforce management nightmare? Read on to discover the secret to giving performance reviews your employees will love to get. You'll learn that it takes more than simply pumping more PRAISE into the appraisal. Here you'll discover the basics for building a foundation of corporation and mutual support.

Do your employees seem defensive, and do you feel tense when it's time for the annual performance reviews? Do they often seem to take your constructive feedback as damning criticism?

But, what if every evaluation or feedback you offered was received as a gift? The information in this article can help you create an environment that will empower your business or organization to function from a foundation of corporation and support.

Evaluation and feedback are essential components of human resource management for any business. The only way your people can know what the company needs from them, and the only way to improve in those areas, is to provide candid, timely, and effective job performance evaluations and employee reviews.

So why are these reviews still one of the most painful rituals in business?

Most organizations assume that everyone is on the same page about real value of this feedback. The problems created by this assumption can dramatically limit the amount of useful feedback employees are able to hear.

Not having both alignment and agreement about this opens the way to confusion, misunderstanding, stress, and defensiveness. What's missing in this assumption can be summed up as a lack of a Shared Conscious Intention, which in turn prevents Mutual Buy-in to the review process.

What do we mean by a Shared Conscious Intention?

Whether you are aware of it or not, every time you give feedback to an employee you have an intention. Even an unconscious intention is sensed by others, and if they sense your tension or irritation about the process, they will often take this personally and interpret it as criticism. This creates a hit or miss context for the resulting conversation.

We suggest that before you give one more performance review, or offer any more feedback, you identify what's important to you about giving your feedback in the first place. Identifying what is important will support you in creating a deliberate intention and a solid context within which your feedback can be well received.

So consider this for a moment. How would your next performance reviews be if everyone shared the intention to create a workplace environment of learning, support, and effectiveness? Getting there might look like this.

Imagine sitting in your office. You're about to give an employee evaluation. Your week has already been hectic and you'd much rather get some constructive work done. On top of this, the employee's performance could use some improvement. In fact, you think the employee could be doing a much better job and has been kind of lazy recently.

In this setting your unconscious intention might be to: get this review over with as soon, and as painlessly as possible. And to get this employee to agree that they should be working harder.

How do you think the employee is likely to respond when they sense this underlying intention?

They might think it means that you're just impatient and dissatisfied with their work. From there they can easily become defensive and resistant, trying to ward off any of the negative consequences of your opinions.

How do you think this conversation will go? Can you see how the employee might have a difficult time hearing or incorporating any feedback that you might offer.

Now let's say that, before you give any more feedback, you decide to create a conscious intention. You ask yourself: "What's most important to me, the company, and the employee about giving feedback?"

You might find that it's important to make sure everyone is clear about what is expected of them so that they can be most effective at their jobs. It may also be important that everyone has the freedom to ask questions and to make sure that they get all the support they need to learn and grow. And that this is important for both you and the employees.

Now image walking in to you next performance review and clearly stating that it is your intention to create an environment of clarity, effectiveness, learning and support - and why this is important to you and the company.

How do you think the other person would respond to this intention? Can you see how the conversation would already go differently than the one created by your earlier, unconscious intention?

Clearly identifying what you value about the feedback process is only the first step. The next step, after expressing what's important to you, is to create both alignment and agreement with the employee about this intention.

You do this by asking if these things are important to them as well, and then continuing this dialog until it produces a Shared Conscious Intention with Mutual Buy-in. This creates a powerful framework for performance reviews.

Within this framework most people welcome the opportunity to discuss their strengths and areas for improvement. It eliminates confusion, misunderstanding, stress, and defensiveness, and opens the way for mutual learning, support, and effectiveness. We believe this can produce a fundamental change in the workplace. One that will not only help you to create a highly effective organization, but also improve the quality of life for you and your employees.

Hire Teamwork-Oriented Employees

You can use pre-employment tests, specific interview questions, realistic job previews, and role-modeling to hire employees who crave to use teamwork and collaboration.

Warning: Many jobs do not need teamwork-oriented employees. Our society greatly values “teamwork.” Also, many leaders are teamwork-oriented, so they erroneously assume they should hire employees who love teamwork.

So, find out which jobs in your company really require collaborative employees. Some jobs do not.

For example, in our pre-employment testing research at many banks, great Tellers usually score high on a test’s Teamwork scale. But, the banks’ successful Bookkeepers score low on the pre-hire test’s Teamwork scale.

Lesson to help you: Use employment tests to objectively discover which jobs truly require teamwork-oriented employees.

Now, let’s delve into some terrific ways to help you hire teamwork-oriented employees.

PRE-EMPLOYMENT TESTS HELP YOU HIRE TEAMWORK-ORIENTED EMPLOYEES

Your fastest and lowest cost method to assess teamwork in a job applicant is pre-employment testing. Start by conducting a “Benchmarking Study” in which you test current employees. Pay special attention to typical test scores of successful employees in each job. Then, you may give pre-hire tests to job applicants, and prefer applicants who get test scores similar to your successful employees – plus also do well on other prediction methods.

Here are employment test scales that help you assess an applicant’s teamwork-orientation:

+ Teamwork test scale
+ Friendliness test scale
+ Helping People Motivation test scale

JOB INTERVIEW QUESTIONS TO EVALUATE APPLICANT ON TEAMWORK

The next method you can use is the job interview. If teamwork proves crucial for success in a job, then make sure you ask questions to uncover how teamwork-oriented the applicant is.

Here are examples of such open-ended questions:

* “What were three gratifying projects or tasks you worked on?”
* “Tell me about three projects or tasks you disliked doing?”

After you ask each question, listen to how much the job applicant mentions teamwork. Applicants who are
- teamwork-oriented will describe gratifying tasks involving working with people
- not teamwork-oriented will say gratifying tasks entail working alone

RJP = REALISTIC JOB PREVIEW TO ASSESS TEAMWORK

If a job candidate does well on your pre-employment tests and job interviews, then you can do a realistic job preview (RJP). This shows what it actually is like to work in the job. An RJP involves the applicant spending a half-day or full-day accompanying an employee to watch the job actually being done.

The RJP serves three purposes. First, a job applicant shows interest in the job by agreeing to spend four to eight hours observing. Second, your employee can unearth valuable insights about the candidate. Third, research shows applicants getting an RJP are (a) less likely to accept a job offer but (b) if they do accept, less likely to turnover.

Make sure the applicant sees the teamwork required to perform the job. Keenly observe the applicant’s reaction to required teamwork.

LEADERS MUST ROLE-MODEL TEAMWORK

If teamwork is required to perform a particular job, then the manager must be a teamwork role model. Then, employees learn how to act on-the-job.

So, if a job requires teamwork, but the manager does poorly at teamwork, then you either need to:

A. help the manager develop teamwork skills
B. replace the manager with someone whose strong suit is teamwork

4 METHODS TO HIRE TEAMWORK-ORIENTED EMPLOYEES

If you use pre-employment test benchmarking or another way to see if a job truly requires teamwork, then you can hire collaborative people by doing the following:

1. Pre-Employment Tests – see if applicant’s test scores are like your best employees’ scores
2. Job Interview – listen to comments about working with people
3. Realistic Job Preview – find out applicant’s reactions to teamwork needed to on-the-job
4. Role Model – exhibit collaboration so your employees to learn by watching you

Why would you bet your career or your company’s success? If a specific job requires teamwork-oriented employees, then you readily can use these four methods to hire job applicants who excel at working with people.

© Copyright 2007 Michael Mercer, Ph.D.

Converting Ideas Into Success Stories

OK, so you have a great idea and you can’t wait to sell it. This baby sells itself, doesn’t it? You may be wrong there and if you are, it will cost you dearly. Converting concepts to successful money making businesses is not easy and requires the following steps.

Viability:–

To put an idea into execution, you need to check on its viability. It may sound really good in theory but not work when put into action. There have been great ideas that have not planned out, simply due to a lack of utility or the lack of a market for the product or service. Make sure that you ask your mentor, or other industry experts for advice. This can be a bit tricky if you don’t want to give your idea away. Alternatively, try to find some small way of testing it out. Another separate and equally important aspect is to decide whether your product or service has an online market. Ask yourself whether people go online looking for your offering and whether these people would buy this offering online. This will help to establish the online viability of your concept.

USP:–

Remember that people are looking for value in your product or service and if you can differentiate yourself by coming up with a unique selling proposition for your business, you will be more successful. Your idea must have merit, essentially and offer something unique that sets it apart in making it attractive to customers. Keep in mind that you are up against a lot of competition on the internet before deciding to go ahead with your plan. Remember also that if your idea is not unique, some other aspect of your approach should be.

Marketing:–

This may be one of the pillars of your online business if you can get it right. Your great concept will only get you so far – to get people to find and buy your product you need the help of a great marketing effort. If you can hire a good search engine optimization team, do that. If not, try to research and read up on the subject to the best of your abilities. Definitely get a good web developer who will follow World Wide Web Consortium standards and will also optimize the structure of your site to make the job of search engines that much easier. Further, get good content that is informative and intelligent to attract customers. Most importantly, look for affiliate programs, email marketing opportunities, start newsletters, blog marketing, banner ads, pay per click and so on. These are the various techniques that help a site get attention from its customers. It is important to get relevant visitors who are looking for your offering or something similar.

Planning/ strategy:–

Have a plan. Create a business model, do projections, make a marketing plan, be ready for difficulties, identify problems and work on problem solving. Educate yourself about your business, the internet and about the product or service you are selling. Once you master this, you will know more about how to plan and structure your start up phase and be ready for future growth. As in any business, an online business needs to have a strategy in place to make money and convert ideas to money making businesses.