Employee performance review meetings are not always greeted with enthusiasm by team members, managers or the HR team responsible for the administration.

This article proposes several ideas to reduce the burden, enhance the meetings and increase the return on investment from regular employee appraisals.

Key takeaways

• Ask more insightful questions
• Gather data you can create actions from
• Conduct shorter reviews, more often
• Use online tools to support the appraisal process

Ask more insightful questions

Creating useful questions can be the hardest part of creating or improving appraisals.

Consider a mix of open-ended questions and competency-based scored questions (i.e. with a rating scale). Asking similar questions to both the appraisee and the appraiser generates useful insight, particularly where significant differences of opinion arise. For greater insights, 360 degree appraisals will generate useful data from employees, managers, peers, customers and senior leaders.

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Great questions to ask in performance reviews

Gather data you can measure and create actions from

When considering questions to include in your reviews, consider what changes and improvements you are looking to drive. Consider challenges you are facing, such as staff retention or excessive absence. Appraisals can be useful to validate (or disprove) your hypotheses, and to help steer improvement programmes. Measuring changes over time by comparing results with previous appraisals helps to monitor the effectiveness of policy changes.

Conduct shorter reviews, more often

The administrative overhead of running a performance review process often steers the decision towards running them only once a year. Annual appraisals, by their nature, tend to be more structured and lead to longer reviews.

We think shorter, less formal reviews generate more open conversation and more usable data.

Consider embracing an agile approach to running your performance appraisals: deliver more frequent reviews and iterate on the findings. Use the results from previous reviews to guide the next round, creating a culture of continuous improvement.

Use great online tools

Of course we're biased, but we want you to use our tools to run fabulous performance reviews and build better appraisal reports.

Great software can reduce the administrative burden for HR teams to create question banks, assign questions to different types of employees, automate reminders, analyse the results and build great reports for heads of departments and senior leaders.

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Performance appraisal software

Getting started

We help teams deliver effective performance appraisal strategies with cloud software that is easy for people to use. We provide ready to use questions and offer support to teams that need to improve their review processes.