Performing Effective Employee Reviews

 Conducting a good employee review is not always easy.  Defining why you are doing the review is a good place to start.  Maybe you give reviews to new hires at 3, 6, 12 months just as a standard.  Maybe there is a wage increased that goes along with these reviews, but what is the real reason you are having them?  Is your goal to help your staff members grow and succeed in their career with you?  Do you have pre-planned questions that you ask?  Depending on the outcome what happens?  By planning your employee reviews out you can actually get valuable information on how the employee is feeling about their job, what they like and dislike, which is very valuable information that you can use to base the progress and outcomes of your training and the future you have with your employees.   Today, my physician (and owner of our business) and I (the office manager) did an employee review on our newest staff member.  She has been with us 6 months and her last review was three months ago.  In order for this review to be effective I had the prepared list of job duties that we went over at her last review ready to talk about her progress and ways to move her forward in training.  I also have been watching, listening and giving input to her training for the past six months and had notes from the last three since her last review to discuss where we felt she may need help and ways to improve.  With all documentation in hand we were ready to proceed with her review.  We opened by letting her know that we were very happy with her progress (by letting her know this from the beginning, it would put her at ease), but there was something that was more important than what I and our physician had been observing over the past months.  What was really important to us was to know how she felt about her job and what she was doing everyday at work.  We asked the following questions and then listened to her, eager to hear what she had to say.  (1) Do you feel you are personally cared for by those you work with?  (2) Are you receiving the training that you need to do the job tasks assigned to you?  (3) Do you feel your personal strengths are being used daily at work?  (4) If you feel things would be better for you if somethings were changed, what would they be and how would you change them?  After listening to her we were thrilled that she was happy and had positive answers to these four questions, which are the heartbeat to the basic needs that people need from their job to be fulfilled.  Once she was done we discussed the few things that we had observed and gave pointers on how to improve in these areas.  What was great is that it was a three-way conversation working together to come up with ways to make all of our jobs each day better by learning how we can work and help each other better.  I am sure the three of us felt that the review was a win-win all of the way around and we are looking forward to the next one.    Please share in the comments how you do reviews, what you have found to be succesful that works and doesn’t work as we all can learn from each other.                   For the full article: Ten Tips for Conducting Employee Performance Reviews