Keyword: mid year reviews

Set the time for reviews to be off-schedule from your main business processes, especially budgetting.  The last thing you want is for your team to be overwhelmed with non-line-of-business work, or to give either budgetting or reviews short shrift.  Neither your business, nor your employees will appreciate that.

For example, if you are on a calendar year schedule and you typically budget in the fall, do your big review right after the first of the year, with a “mini-review” in the summer. (See my FAQ on review frequency.) A typical schedule would be to set the reviews to be written and delivered in late January (due January 31), and then for the checkup review to be due by July 31st.

This approach lets you budget for the pay increases that will happen right after the first of the year.  You will also have light weight reviews in the middle of the cycle, in time for managers to give their best guess as to necessary pay increases for the next budget season.  See, there is a rhyme and reason to these things…

Immediately after an organization decides to do performance reviews, the first thing they ask is: how often should we do them?  There is very real tension between providing enough feedback to the employees, and making painful busy work for the management team.  Fortunately there is a good compromise that many people choose.

I recommend that you do performance reviews on a twice-a-year cycle that includes a comprehensive annual review with a mid-year “checkup” review.  This approach has several important advantages:

• Employees get feedback more than once a year, which is a real benefit.  Most managers simply never give enough feedback, and this kind of system forces it to happen.
• The burden on the team to go through the process is lessened by the lighter weight mid-year reviews.
• You can offer pay increases and other rewards more than once a year. (I firmly believe in tying pay changes to the performance review.)
• Practice makes perfect - if you only do reviews once a year, people get out of practice.  By doing them more frequently, managers get better at delivering both good and bad messages, and employees get used to getting feedback.

Reviews don’t have to be that hard.  If you would like to see examples of what I think performance reviews should look like, see the performance review whitepaper elsewhere on the site.