The calibre of your employees’ performance impacts each part of your business.

From day-to-day tasks to bigger decisions, your employees play a major role in achieving your objectives.

And for employees to perform well, they need to be crystal clear on their expectations and how to meet and exceed them.

In other words, we need to review performance AND develop performance.

But what’s the difference between the two?

Reviewing performance

A performance review is an analysis and conversation about the expectations for an employee and how well they met those expectations during a set time frame (i.e. one year or one quarter).

“Everybody who works for you needs to know where they stand and how they are doing compared to your expectations of them”, shares Entrepreneur.com.

Reviewing performance isn’t always formal — and it’s not always done on a yearly basis.

It can take on any of the following forms:

• Structured performance review (i.e. quarterly, annually)
• Informal performance review
• Check-in conversations with employees
• Meetings that discuss individual or departmental goals compared with current status
• Employee self-review
• 360 feedback reports
• And many more

When an employee knows how they compare to expectations and goals, they’re able to adjust their work to meet what the company needs.

Developing performance

Though reviewing performance is vital — no matter how you decide to conduct it — developing performance is just as critical.

Even when employees know where they stand in relation to expectations, they aren’t always able to improve performance on their own.

That’s where you come in.

As a leader, you give them the tools and resources necessary to enhance their performance, keeping it in alignment with what the team and company needs.

Performance development is a tandem effort by the employee and the manager.

Ways to develop performance

Working with your employees to improve their productivity, skills, and decision-making abilities makes your team exponentially stronger.

When every employee is working at their highest level, the highest results are achieved.

Enhancing your employees’ performance will, of course, be specific to your team — but here are several ways that have proven successful in other companies:

• Get clear on your employee’s passions and interests so that you can guide them to doing work that is meaningful to them
• Provide funds and time for seminars, conferences, webinars, workshops, and online classes that relate to the areas in which your employees can make the biggest impact
• Offer one-on-one coaching sessions with a supervisor or lead team member
• Allow time for reading books, journals, and online articles that improve employee’s understanding and inventory of ideas
• Identify and establish a mentor for the individual
• Give the employee an opportunity to shadow another team member
• Offer an open door policy for employees to come to you and discuss processes or decisions
• Celebrate successes and improvements — to motivate further improvement and express gratitude

Any questions?

If you have questions on this topic or any others, feel free to reach me by email or set up a free one-on-one consultation session, or drop me a comment below.
Thanks for sharing!