Upgrade Your Performance Reviews

It's no secret that the time-honored tradition of the annual performance review has been under intense scrutiny, recently. In fact, a recent study revealed that almost half of HR professionals believe they are inaccurate. And they're the people who manage them!
Everyone agrees that it is helpful to set goals, measure progress towards them and provide constructive feedback. The problem is that modern businesses need to adjust priorities on a dime to react to changing market and competitive conditions. By the time review season comes around and you dust off last year's goals, they seem like ancient history. How can we make performance reviews operate at the speed of a 21st century workplace?
We need to build an ongoing feedback loop into daily work that allows us to constantly monitor and adjust professional development goals and skill acquisition. Here are some sources for useful feedback.

• Use project management software. There are many good tools online that help you manage tasks and assignments for people. When you create assignments, also note the skills exercised in doing those assignments. Then you can mine this data for insight on skill development. Are people using the skills that are in line with their development goals?


• Optimize teams for skill development. All teams have superstars in a particular skill and others just beginning to develop the skill. Foster mentor/apprentice relationships inside your teams and build knowledge transfer into your development goals. Track that apprentices are picking up new skills.


• Verify skills by results. These days, people learn new skills in many ways; Internet research, working with colleagues, classes and seminars, to name a few. The only true certification is a job well done. Linking skills to tasks allows you to provide your own "final exam" to verify skill acquisition. Build completion of skill-verifying tasks into performance goals.


• Gamify development goals. Gamification is taking the enterprise by storm. It refers to awarding public badges for meeting goals. Set up employee profiles that track progress towards goals and award badges on meeting them. Then you have an at-a-glance real-time record of progress towards development goals. With real-time information, you can adjust goals accordingly or get an early warning of someone who is off track.

To achieve this level of visibility into daily work, it is next to impossible to manage this data by hand. You need a system that actively monitors daily progress toward development goals and provides appropriate alerts.

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