Business Monitor Are reviews a O
wners of small businesses and managers in bigger operations often feel that annual performance reviews are a waste of time. So, they don’t do them or do them poorly. That’s a missed opportunity, but I understand the thinking. Basically, they all say by one means or another that performance reviews are not for them. No, they are a big company thing. Sure, when you’ve got hundreds of people to look after you need reviews. But we haven’t even got dozens so why waste time on reviews?
That’s fair but it just focuses on the negatives and misses the positives. And they are many.
A big issue
The first and biggest issue is employee recruitment and retention. Currently, job-hunters become job-finders very quickly. There’s a shortage of people not jobs. So good staff are hard to find and expensive to retain. Deal with it.
What do you want from your employees? Do they know that? Has that changed or is it likely to? What do they want from you? Do you know? You might, for instance, want to create a time flexible working week. They might like to move to home-working, three days a week. Issues like that need to be discussed in a formal environment: a review.
You might have an employee who has real potential – customer skills, technical know-how, real management potential. If you don’t develop this person, they will find a business that will. You could lose your best employee and he could recruit your best clients. Not a nice thought! Instead that person, carefully cultivated, could turn into your most valuable advocate, bringing you other great staff and/ or clients.
Important for business
Transparency is important in business. If staff are kept informed and updated you can persuade them to do any number of things which you might expect them to dig in their heels about. An annual review presents an excellent opportunity to communicate those matters which
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constitute transparency. Please note that this is not a one-way street. You have the right to tell the team bad news as well as good. ‘Sorry, we won’t be paying a bonus this year, to be sure that we’re still trading next year’. It’s bad news but it is entirely transparent.
In the same vein a review is when you tell people about a pay rise. This of course is tricky: giving everybody a 10% rise is nice and easy to communicate. But it might well not achieve your aims. Equally, staff know who puts in most and least effort – paying everyone the same can be as unfair as the opposite. No, it’s not easy. A profit share looks like a solution. Yes, but not if the package clearly benefits the boss and staff have to put in double effort to gain rewards. As you can tell, I was once on the wrong end of this.
Giving someone a telling off is the reason that reviews developed a bad name, but it is the natural time and place to address issues formally. The review should be held at an agreed time and place, giving the staff member time to prepare. If there’s a major issue, spelling it out in advance is desirable. A successful review is often when both sides are critical of each other: ‘you’re invariably late in the morning’, countered with ‘you don’t complain that I’m often still here at 6pm’ is good news – it clears the air.
Time-keeping should be minor. Failing to invoice work promptly, constantly bitching about other staff members, simply being lazy are all no-nos and need to be jumped on because they harm the business overall.
Come together
You and your staff together could create a good review format: it would be tailored to your needs and would exclude some of the nonsense that finds its way into a review. However, it’s likely to lack structure. Start by looking at the recommendations of the Federation of Small Businesses. As you’d expect they are totally practical. This might encourage you to become a member – money well spent in my view. As a minimum you use this as a template to design your own structure. There are also a range of software programs that offer the same thing. I’m not the person to recommend one. I can merely suggest you do a Google search and then compare them. I would personally find such a task irksome in the extreme and would be mustard keen to pass it over to a techie staff member. When I asked contacts the two names that came up most were Eloomi and Culture Amp. Both were considered simple to use. I looked at the Career Cafe because it offers a free service which is my favourite price point when I am new to something. Free yes but not so simple.
December 2021 | 15 | missed opportunity?
This month, marketing expert, Paul Clapham, questions whether annual performance reviews are a waste of time or not?
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