Why Your Team Hates Your Performance Reviews
Performance reviews make people feel like cogs in a machine. But Quartely Check-ins? They align, support, and develop.
I've spoken with hundreds of business owners over the last decade.
I've found two conditions to be most common regarding structured feedback for team members:
Traditional performance reviews that employees dread and the managers hate authoring.
No consistent review.
Both of these suck.
The former treats people like cogs in a machine.
The latter disrespects team members by failing to provide a path to success.
At kitchen & bath CRATE, we struggled with this issue for years.
Then, my friend Craig introduced me to his system.
We made a few modifications and have been using it successfully since. Here's how it works. (And a download for you to use!)
First, The Format
Before we dive in, here is a template for you. (Excel, Google Sheets)
We start with a simple spreadsheet.
Each tab is a separate check-in session. (Bonus: This creates an easily accessible record of past check-ins.)
Each check-in has two sections, each asking a fundamental question:
Top: To what extent does this team member exhibit the organization's core values?
Bottom: How effective is this individual in carrying out their key roles and responsibilities?
That's it. 5-10 line items, each with a 1-3 rating. Easy!
Leading up to the Check-in
A few days before the check-in, the manager creates a new tab in the shared spreadsheet and asks the employee to complete their ratings and comments.
Core Values are rated from 1 (Rarely exhibiting the value) to 3 (Exhibiting the value with great frequency).
Key Roles are rated from 1 (Substandard performance) to 3 (Exceptional performance).
Once completed by the managee, the manager hides the managee's response column (so as not to be swayed) and fills in the "Manager Rating" column. Lastly, the manager adds comments as needed.
The Day of the Check-in
The day of the check-in should not be about surprising the team member. They should have an accurate sense of how they are doing before the check-in. Why? Because good managers bring things up as they go, they don't wait for a check-in.
This allows the check-in to be about alignment, support, and development.
Alignment: Go through each core value and role together. Talk about any comments either of you left. Discuss any item where the two of you rated the item differently. Work to understand each other's perspective.
Support: The manager listens for roadblocks the team member is encountering, then comes up with specific to-dos to remove these roadblocks.
Development: The team member generates specific action items to focus on in the next 90 days, writing these in the "This Quarter's New Expectations" column.
The Day After the Check-in
The next day, the manager sends a brief email memorializing the following:
Summarize the meeting and highlight a few takeaways from the check-in.
Include a list of the items each party agreed to accomplish in the next quarter. (For the manager, these are the roadblocks needing removal, and for the team member, these are the upcoming quarter's new expectations.)
Confirm the next meeting date and time.
The Results of Using Check-ins
Craig's format is clean, simple, efficient, collaborative, and helpful. All the things a standard performance appraisal fails to be.
The Quartley Check-in keeps the organization's core values front and center. Core values are not a list on a wall. They are a living, breathing set of principles against which all parties must regularly evaluate themselves.
Quarterly check-ins often uncover key roles and responsibilities that must be added, deleted, or changed.
Since the original list of key roles should have come from the team member's job description, when it's time to update the job description, the manager can compare the existing check-in list to the original job description and edit accordingly.
Lastly, this process helps newer employees realize the "job is the job." It's one thing to read a job description and say, "Yes, I will do that!" It's another thing to have to ask yourself, "Am I really doing this well?"
It's common for our first 1-2 check-ins with new employees to contain an "Oh, I totally forgot I was supposed to be doing that!" moment. And that's OK because "responsibility drift" is natural and must be combatted regularly.
I encourage you to adopt quarterly check-ins with your team. Start slow. Identify someone on your team with whom you need to connect and put the meeting on the calendar. I assure you both parties will benefit!
I’d love it if a few more folks read this newsletter. Might you consider forwarding it to someone you think might benefit from it?
Books of Note: I lost my father to opioid addiction. (He's still alive but gone, you know?) Hence, my interest in the origin of the opioid epidemic is strong. So when I came across Empire of Pain, I grabbed it. It's a stunning history of the Sackler family, beginning in Brooklyn more than 80 years ago when a doctor (Arthur Sackler) stumbled upon the power of pharmaceutical marketing. Fast forward 40 years, and OxyContin hit the scene. Wondering "how did we get here?" Well, this is a massive piece of the puzzle.
I’d love a follow over on X (Twitter) and Linkedin, as I post things there that are either too brief for the newsletter or are just entertaining things I come up with over a responsibly-sized serving of Blanton’s.