Manage Them – How To Conduct A Review 

So the idea is you meet every 6 months or 12 months and review your employee’s progress or performance in their role. You can do it in a general sense (you know, ‘how’ve they done in a general sense) and you can do it by reference to the specific responsibilities in their job description. 

I suggest you do both.

Prepare questions in advance, send them to your employee and ask them to provide their answers in time for the review meeting. 

You also spend some time answering the same question – how do you think they’re performing? In the review, you can both review their view and your view of how they’re doing. 

You’ll probably be surprised how similar your answers are.

I’ll suggest some questions but feel free to add your own or omit some. 

General Questions You Can Use For The Review

• How do you think you’re going, generally, in your job?
• What things do you think you do well?
• What things don’t you think you do well or what could you get better at? 
• What do you need to work on to get better at them? 
• How could we help you get better at those things? 
• What training or support do you think you need to help you do your job better?
• What are your hopes or ambitions for your job or career here? 
• What do you need to work on to help you realise those ambitions or progress your career? 
• How can we help you with that? 
• What feedback could you give me about my role here? What could I do better/how could we make it easier for you to do your job well?

Do you see what’s happening? You’re asking them to assess their own performance and what they’re doing well and what they need to work on and what help you can give them. 

You get to see if you agree – if their self-assessment is honest or insightful or they don’t know what they’re doing well and not. If they get it, you’ll agree, if not, you’ll have to correct their view, won’t you? Or agree to differ or come to some compromise or change your view. 

So you, together, recognise their good stuff and note down stuff to work on or make a plan for what you and they can do so they get better. You review again next time and see if the stuff got done and if they got better. You’re looking for progress – don’t expect them to fix everything first time. And try to make sure you do your bit as well.

Recommended Reading: Good Leadership (For Tradies And Builders)

So you write notes – you ask your general questions, then rate them on the specific responsibilities in their job description and on the things that show how we’ll know if they’re doing a good job.

You write down your agreed judgments and you write down the things each of you agrees to do. They might agree to try to improve certain things, you might too. You might agree to send them on a course and give them some specific training yourself, they might agree to buy some tools, etc.

And you write it down so you can look at it next time and see if each of you did your things and if you think they’ve improved and you go again – further improvements, new learning opportunities as the business grows or they grow, that kind of thing. Don’t overcomplicate this.

Give them a copy of the notes and keep a copy in your ‘Team’ folder for next time.

You might have noticed (and you might not) that I haven’t suggested you give a score or a mark. I’m not sure it serves a good purpose. Lots of people like numbers and measurement, it makes things easy to compare and rank, you can use it to decide if people deserve a pay rise or a bonus. But it’s also likely to cause ill-feeling and negative comparison. We don’t give a score in our business.

Or a balance; I wouldn’t. If you feel the need, consider a – good, okay, needs improvement scoring system. But I would prefer you to focus on progress and behaviors than scores and pain/fail paradigms. 

And that’s how you conduct a review. It should be a pleasant experience. If it’s not, if the employee is a poor performer and not trying to improve, you have to consider performance management, which is something else again.