Performance shouldn’t be something people discover at review time.
If someone is doing brilliantly, struggling or heading in the wrong direction, they should know before a formal review tells them.
DESIGNED DELIBERATELY.
USED NATURALLY.
Where things tend to go wrong
- Expectations aren’t as clear as everyone thinks they are.
- Managers avoid feedback until they have to give it.
- Different managers have very different ideas of “good”.
- Reviews become the performance process rather than one part of it.
- Progression and performance start getting muddled together.
Usually, the review process isn’t the whole problem.
If feedback only happens at review time, changing the review form won’t fix that. If managers have different ideas of good performance, adding another rating scale probably won’t either.
I’d look at what people understand about expectations, what conversations are actually happening, how managers make judgements and what the business can see between formal review points.
What we build depends on what’s actually missing.
That could mean clearer expectations, better everyday conversations, a simpler review rhythm, calibration, progression criteria, manager tools or changes to the systems behind it.
It doesn’t automatically mean building all of them.
In one project, I piloted monthly performance spot checks, shared definitions and calibration. Following calibration, 75% of ratings sat in the top performance tiers. That describes the ratings at that point; it doesn’t, on its own, prove performance improved.
Read the performance case study →Tell me what’s happening with performance.
Where are expectations, feedback or progression decisions getting stuck?
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