I’m looking at advice for someone preparing for a performance review. I’d love to draw on the accumulated wisdom of the folks here, if possible.
What does one do to prepare? How many months out? In principle, the person’s manager sets out goals and measurable objectives and the employee should be working towards them, but I’m guessing in practice, things are much vauguer and more fluid.
Can you suggest any useful articles for a young graduate to look at?
Are performance reviews annual or every six months. How much before do you begin to prepare for the performance reviews. Do you prepare anything in writing? [No doubt depends upon the employer]
The companies I have worked with over the last 15 years or so all seem to have gone to the process of the employee submitting a self assessment and then the manager supplementing either before or after the review conversation.
This is nice in each employee doesn’t have to recreate the wheel. The process is there, the goals are there and you just have to measure yourself against the goals. When things are good and the employee and manager agree for the most part on the self assessment it is painless; when there is disagreement it gets tougher but the nice part is the employee’s assessment stays in the document/system so they have a voice.
In the beginning these self assessments would take me hours. Pouring over reports, trying to recreate the year, recalling what was done and when; it was awful. Along the way I have learned to keep a spreadsheet of my goals and each time I do something that applies, put it in the spreadsheet. This was at review time everything is in one place, can be copied and pasted, and then the only thing I need to do is compare what I did to the goal, a very quick process.
I advise that the employee not say anything negative about himself or herself in anything written that will become part of his or her permanent personnel file. Leave it to the employer to come up with the negatives. That said, employees should try to be aware of performance issues and try to resolve them in a positive way for themselves and their employers. But having a written “confession” from the employee probably will not benefit the employee and might hurt him or her.
I’ve been with one company for about 30 years. The performance review process has changed over the years. Now, we get them once per year. Employees do a self-assessment but it does not become part of the file without their agreement. We make goals (individual, team, organization) and are supposed to be prepared to discuss, at the performance review, progress toward the goals.
How often a review is done depends on the company. Many are annually. A few are every 6 months. Some are at 3 to 6 months for the first year, then go annually.
I would tell a new employee to find an experienced mentor within the organization, a person they can go to with questions. It does not need to be a supervisor, though maybe could be the person that trained them at the beginning.
I would encourage the person to just go and do the job. Good employers will not expect perfection and will say something if the employee did something not quite right (ie no news is good news).
The employee should not expect perfect marks on an evaluation, especially the first few. Most good employers will give a lesser score in order to encourage growth and reaching towards becoming better. We are not perfect and there is always something we can do better. So, if the evaluations give numbers 1-5, then the employee should probably expect mostly 3’s on the first one. They are doing great if they get some 4’s and not terrible if they get some 2’s.
They should really look at the evaluation, ask questions on things they don’t understand, and double down on the things they got less than 3 on.
I agree with making a spreadsheet. That helped H as well, since he was doing so many different things and his supervisors had NO idea of all the varied things he did and he couldn’t remember things he did many months prior when he was focusing on the latest projects he was working on at review time.
I am a relative Luddite and don’t even know how to make a spreadsheet. However, at the back of my yearly calendar, I list all of my accomplishments. For my review, I am required to list 4 - 5 things that I accomplished over the past year and the running list helps to jog my memory. I also track and chart specific activities that I do for my job because, in certain things, quantity counts.
For my review, I am also required to set a couple of goals and then, the next year, I have to say how it worked out. For instance, one year I said that I planned to learn about a related area to my work that I don’t generally have to do. I went to a couple of seminars on the subject and was bored to tears. At my next review, I told my boss how awful that area of law was, but I got the points for having gone outside my comfort zone.
I suggest getting a copy of the form as soon as possible and working on it for as long as possible before submitting it. There is an art to it. When I do my first draft, I vent, vent, vent. Then I cut out all of my vents and redraft it to try to make myself as close to Mother Teresa as possible. After that, I redo and make it realistic. That’s the draft I hand in. I don’t share my review report with anyone else but I suggest that people newer to the work force might consider running their self-assessment past a person with more experience with them.