Most performance reviews or appraisals are a waste of time and money, generating lots of paperwork but precious little benefit. Some are box-ticking exercises to justify HR departments’ existence, providing cheering guff for the annual report. Others have degenerated into pay and bonus negotiations, or are the weapons of choice for ruthless office politicians.
And yet, the key to making a review genuinely useful for the employees, their line managers and the organisation lies in asking just six basic questions. Here are the first five:
Do you know what you’re doing here; what your objectives are?
Do you know what our organisation’s strategy is, and how your work fits in with that strategy?
Do you know how well you’re doing?
Do you know what you should be aiming to achieve in the near future?
Do you know how well equipped you are to do that?
The line manager’s job is to put these questions to their employee, and listen very hard to the employee’s responses. Long experience suggests that most employees can’t really answer all these questions, and the line manager’s job in the review is to guide the employee in working out the answers. After which, it’s time for the sixth and final basic question:
Do we agree what I, as your line manager, need to do to help you get there?
Despite the fact that these questions are just business common sense, there is little evidence that organisations are currently asking these simple but fundamental questions of their people. Worse still, we suspect that significant numbers of line managers would struggle to tell their reports just how their team’s work fits into the bigger picture, because they don’t have much of a clue themselves.
It is by no means clear that the majority of businesses have taken the time to make explicit how the day-to-day tasks performed by frontline teams relate to the company’s wider strategy. People do what they do because they’ve been told to do it, and have little idea how they fit into the big picture.
This could be because the top suits in the C-suite regard the business strategy as something so secret that shouldn’t be shared with mere employees – which is just not good for business. Even if you’re planning a future shift in strategy and want to keep it quiet, your people should still be aware of your current strategy.
Or it could be that the company’s strategy is so abstruse or jargon-ridden that it really doesn’t have any practical relevance for the daily toil performed by the average employee – which is actually saying that the company doesn’t have a practical strategy.
That, in turn, means the company is not going to survive in the long run; more purposeful firms who know exactly what they’re doing, and why, will turn up and eat the company’s lunch.
