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Performance Review Strategies To Boost Employee Retention

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | Performance Review Strategies To Boost Employee Retention

Performance reviews are essential for organizations because they help measure workforce productivity, identify gaps, and address them to get things on track. But they can be stressful for employees, specifically when they move in a negative direction. The problem is more widespread than you imagine. While appraisals should be inherently constructive, they can hurt motivation and lead to dissatisfaction. You may also encounter a high turnover challenge if your review process has drawbacks. The best option is to reconsider and rework your strategies to make people comfortable with assessments. Let us share a few performance review strategies to boost employee retention.

Embrace A Constructive Mindset

The right mindset is everything when it comes to assessing your employees. Ideally, your performance reviews should be constructive rather than negative. Think of ways to help people address their shortcomings instead of only giving them negative feedback and leaving the improvement to them. At the same time, appreciate the good work so that people have something to feel motivated enough to stick around.

Evaluate Comprehensively

Another surefire tip to ramp up your performance review strategies for better retention is to evaluate employees in a comprehensive way. Conducting 360-degree reviews is a good option because they entail feedback from everyone an employee works with. You can check employee performance management solutions by primalogik for a free 360-degree template. Getting comprehensive feedback means you have a better view of strengths and weaknesses instead of only the negatives in people.

Consider Learning Styles

People learn differently, so assessments should also consider learning styles to be more value-adding in the long run. The idea is to eliminate learning curves so that they can make self-improvement. Moreover, you must follow their learning styles to create individual coaching programs to address their weaknesses. When employees get a chance to improve without stress, they are likely to stay with the organization for the long haul.

Build Trust and Dialogue

Trust is the mainstay of employee loyalty and retention, so it should be a part of the performance review strategy. But building trust is perhaps one of the most challenging issues for organizations. However, you can achieve it by setting a positive dialogue as a part of the process. Ensure training managers for appraisal conversations, as it enables them to get employees on their side, even when sharing negative feedback..

Ensure Continuous Feedback

Conventional review systems focus on the yearly conversation between managers and employees. But you cannot expect them to improve instantly because problems worsen over time. You can limit the stress by implementing continuous feedback to set short-term project goals, discuss roadblocks, and provide professional development opportunities. People can improve faster and grow with ongoing learning. They feel less anxious about annual reviews, making the ride smoother for them.

Employee retention is one of the significant growth factors for an organization. While several factors affect it, performance reviews play a key role as they determine the growth and learning curve for employees. You can implement these review strategies to make people stay for the long haul and contribute to your company.

Get Better Results by Looking at Your Team Differently

Why do you pay your team members? If you asked them, they might answer “You pay us to work.” If you ask an office-based worker what ‘work’ means to them, you’ll get a list of typical workday activities. They read and write emails. They write reports. They go to meetings and attend conference calls. Those activities that sound appropriate enough, but they don’t give a complete picture of what ‘work’ means to you.

There are two different definitions of ‘work’ in the dictionary. Your team members likely subscribe to the one that defines ‘work’ as “mental or physical activity as a means of earning income; employment.” Given you’re responsible for your team achieving its goals, you probably lean toward the other one which defines “work” as “activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.”

The two definitions are similar in that they revolve around physical or mental activity but they differ significantly on the purpose of the work. The implication here is you must hold your team members accountable for the results they achieve – not the activities they perform. That accountability contributes to the collective results your team delivers. Activities your team members think of as “work” are the inputs that go into getting the real outcome you desire – results that lead you to achieve your goals.

You need to evaluate the amount of output you get from a team member (the results of their work) and compare that to the amount of time and energy you have to invest in them to get it. We call that second piece ‘leadership capital.’ The result of those comparisons is the Leadership Matrix (or ‘the box’ for short). Within that matrix, we define behavioral archetypes from Slackers to Rising Stars and everything in between. The real insight lies in practical advice on how to lead those folks to improve their performance. To assess that performance, you need a deep understanding of the output generated by your team members. Those are the outcomes to assess when placing team members on the Leadership Matrix.

Mike Figliuolo - Leadership Matrix

Assessing the Output of Your Team Members

The output question leaders need to focus on is “are my team members producing the results I need given all the investments – pay, equipment, supplies, my time and energy – I’m making in them?” Assess each team member’s output – results that contribute to your team goals. To conduct this assessment, you’ll evaluate five elements of team member output:


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About the Author

Mike FigliuoloMike Figliuolo is the co-author of Lead Inside the Box: How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results and the author of One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership. He’s the managing director of thoughtLEADERS, LLC – a leadership development training firm. An Honor Graduate from West Point, he served in the U.S. Army as a combat arms officer. Before founding his own company, he was an assistant professor at Duke University, a consultant at McKinsey & Co., and an executive at Capital One and Scotts Miracle-Gro. He regularly writes about leadership on the thoughtLEADERS Blog.

Organizational Accountability Warning Flag 2 – Time-based Performance Assessments

StrategyDriven Organizational Accountability Warning Flag ArticleHow often have you, as an executive or manager, looked at the cars in the parking lot as you come into or depart from your workplace and said to yourself, “So and so are really contributing to the organization,” based on seeing their cars. Or seeing no one else’s car reflected on your own performance as, “I’m a top contributor. I put in more hours than anyone else.”


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Additional Information

Associating time with performance represents the weak analogy fallacy. Additional information regarding this fallacy and how to recognize when it occurs can be found in StrategyDriven’s decision-making warning flag article, Weak Analogies.

Management Observation Program Best Practice 9 – Feeding the Performance Management Program

StrategyDriven Management Observation Program Best Practice ArticleMost companies employ a periodic employee review program, typically comprised of a major annual review and sometimes complimented by a formal mid-year feedback session. Examination of these programs reveals most performance ratings are based on those individual behaviors, events, and accomplishments occurring within a few weeks of a review’s development. Consequently, employees achieving great success throughout the year, particularly those with significant achievements earlier in the period, feel cheated by a process that frequently overlooks these accomplishments.


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