Looking Ahead — Continuous Performance Reviews

Performance reviews — many managers and business leaders cringe when they hear this phrase. Traditionally performance reviews, from a manager’s perspective, tend to be time consuming and a waste of effort. Performance reviews from an employee’s point of view tends to create self-doubt and nervousness.

Performance reviews shouldn’t be used as a tool once a year, half year, or even quarterly, but should be ongoing. Think back to school, you typically get a syllabus at the start of every class (job duties), you have assignments and deadlines (projects and milestones), after you turn in an assignment you get graded immediately (feedback), you don’t wait 3–6 months. Performance reviews should be treated like this, also known as continuous reviews. In the security industry this is especially critical — here is why:

• Course Correct Immediately: Most work in the security industry revolves around protecting internal or external client’s digital assets, therefore making sure work is completed on time and up to par is critical. Each task should be reviewed, like a school project, with feedback given immediately. If each project or task is given feedback, positive or negative, it will prevent future mistakes. On the spot feedback is like muscle reflex and helps tremendously (grosum, 2016).
• Weed Out the Bad Seeds: Continuous reviews and open communication between managers and staff results in timely feedback of the project or task at hand. This can motivate the over performers to keep over achieving and help the under performers get their performance up to par. Managers no longer have to wait an entire quarter, half, or even year to have the hard conversation with employees who just aren’t cutting it. This approach can help managers weed out the bad seeds early on (Fisher, 2015).
• Retention: When employees have a clear set of expectations, it can eliminate confusion about what their responsibilities are and motivates them to perform to a satisfactory or above level. By having continuous reviews, you are constantly establishing or altering employee goals; by keeping communication open, employees can have a say in what their goals should be and how they will go about achieving them. By allowing employees to help control their goals, this shows the employee that the manager/ company has confidence in them, and in turn the employee will have confidence in the company and their manager (Deeb, 2016). The more confidence employees have in their manager and the company, the more loyal they will be.

Having continuous reviews can eliminate the headache and paperwork of traditional reviews, keep employee performance up, and help identify weaknesses more quickly. Not to mention, these reviews are a perfect opportunity for manager coaching and gives the employee a chance to work on not only professional goals, but personal goals as well.

Lisa Green is the Director, People Relations at Independent Security Evaluators.

Twitters: @ISESecurity, @lisa_a_green

References
Deeb, C. (2016). How Employee Evaluation May Be Used to Increase Employee Retention. Retrieved from Chron: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/employee-evaluation-may-used-increase-employee-retention-41421.html
Fisher, A. (2015, June 16). How Adobe keeps key employees from quitting. Retrieved from Fortune: http://fortune.com/2015/06/16/adobe-employee-retention/
grosum. (2016, June 6). 10 Ways for Continuous Performance Evaluation and Feedback. Retrieved from grosum: https://grosum.com/blog.do?method=openBlogBody&id=10_ways_for_Continuous_Performance_Evaluation_and_Feedback