Evaluating Performance During The Pandemic

Tips to support your team in a fully remote, hybrid, or fully in-office work environment

Performance feedback is central to helping employees develop skills, realize their potential, and feel engaged. For HR leaders, performance feedback has become especially important during the Covid-19 pandemic, as they provide a chance for alignment, critical conversations, and gaining insights on employee experience and needs. 
 

Making performance feedback successful within an organization requires clarity and care from leadership as well as shared understanding from managers and employees alike. Although all companies are different and require their own bespoke system, there are best practices and general guidelines that are ubiquitous for any organization. Creating an employee performance feedback template (one that you can use in a remote or hybrid environment), integrated with best practices, will give your organization the clarity and transparency necessary to support all employees while working toward companywide objectives and key results (OKRs).

And note, these recommendations will support your team in a fully remote, hybrid, or fully in-office work environment.  

Designing and executing a performance feedback approach is critical for HR leaders to keep a pulse on their organization and effectively support their workforce. Here are some scalable best practices that work across industries:

Customize performance feedback questions that reflect your company. Every organization has its own culture, language, and rhythm. While performance feedback should always be clear and direct, it should not feel foreign or clinical. 

Fold in goals and OKRs. One way to personalize your performance feedback is to ensure every individual creates goals for themselves. It is critical that employees know exactly what is expected of their performance. The other important piece is tying the performance feedback to your organization’s OKRs. Not only will this help guide the overall conversation, it will also allow teams and individuals to see how their work directly connects to the overall strategy of the company.

Look to your values. Adding core values to your performance feedback is a powerful way to connect culture and work. It also shows employees that the company’s values mean something—and they mean something in concrete ways. Make sure you have defined the values with examples of how they show up in individual actions and teamwork.

Always leave room for questions. Every performance feedback template should include a section dedicated to questions. Creating the space for questions helps employees feel safe using their voice. Encourage employees and managers to prepare questions ahead of time.

Create a cadence. Most companies operate on a quarterly system, making it easy to create a 4-times-a-year review process. Even if that is obvious to you, it is important to communicate the cadence companywide. Employees and managers have a lot to focus on, so acknowledge the process by adding key dates to shared calendars and reminding folks during all-hands meetings when the review cycle is approaching.

Train managers & employees. No employee ever wants to feel surprised when going into a performance feedback session. Likewise, managers want to create an environment of open feedback, honest conversation, and positivity. Once you have created a performance feedback template, share it with managers. Managers should then go over the template during their 1:1 conversations with their direct reports.

Understand the results. Assess employee performance through a calibration system. If you don’t have a tool in place to do so, Betterworks offers tailored reporting and calibration that works specifically for your company.

Ask for feedback to iterate. Once the feedback cycle is complete, solicit input about the process from both managers and individual contributors. This gesture not only helps you create a better, more engaging process, it shows that leadership is flexible and open to change. 

Creating a performance feedback template is a huge step in making sure the processes you are building actually stick. In addition, performance feedback templates:
 

When we think about performance feedback, we tend to think about a manager reviewing a direct report. This is a common use for a performance feedback session, but there are other use cases as well — self-assessment, annual reviews, and one-off or project-related reviews. We have broken down what to include on each type of performance feedback template. 

Maintaining positivity and framing employee performance feedback thoughtfully is key to building an effective template. The following are the core elements to an employee performance feedback template:
 

Self-assessment feedback provides a way for employees to look objectively at their work without outside influence from managers or colleagues. While beneficial for a holistic approach to employee feedback, self-assessments can feel awkward or forced. 
 
To avoid those pitfalls, create a template that lists out the core competencies of the employee’s role. Under each of the core competencies, list out the exact actions taken. This way, the individual contributor knows precisely what they are evaluating for themselves.

For example, if the individual is a Marketing Manager, their buckets may include:

A simplified template is used for projects or discrete instances of time that will not be repeated (e.g., an employee fills in for someone on parental leave). The simplified version will include different sections depending on the type of work or unique situation. The most effective one-off feedback templates include a section of expectations set (ideally) before the project began. If you have explicitly agreed-upon expectations, list them out in the review along with metrics associated.
 
Simplified review templates often do not include an assessment of Core Values, ties to larger OKRs, or feedback from multiple people. Employees are not usually expected to reach a stretch target in a short period of time, so they really depend on the goals and expectations set before the engagement.  As with every feedback session, leave room for questions, comments, and input on how to improve the process.

Performance feedback templates and best practices serve to create a fair and transparent process. Using them in tandem with a continuous performance enablement program is a powerful way to align employees on top priorities, understand the motivations and needs of your people, and make progress on upskilling and retaining top talent.  

Andrea Lagan is the COO at Betterworks. She is a customer experience veteran with nearly 25 years’ experience, Andrea has successfully led teams responsible for driving business growth, customer retention, and exceptional customer experiences. Andrea has had numerous successes from her previous experiences as COO at FinancialForce, chief customer and people officer at Alfresco, VP of cloud support at Oracle, VP of global support and operations at NetScout, director of operations at Remedy. Connect Andrea Lagan