Midyear Checkup: Looking Back, Thinking Ahead
We can hear you already: Annual performance reviews are such a pain in the neck, why would I want to double the agony by doing them at midyear, too?
Bear with us. The benefits outweigh your fears.
The midyear mark is a good time to check on employees’ progress toward their performance goals. It’s a good
time to make sure development plans are on track — and make adjustments if they’re not. Finally, midyear is the right time to assess and revise goals for the rest of the year.
In a nutshell: Midyear is the perfect time for employees and managers to combine their discussions and plans around goal-setting and appraisals.
In addition, consider these other important reasons for midyear performance reviews, from respected HR veteran Victor Lipman:
1. They force managers to give meaningful feedback. Meaningful feedback between managers and their reports is assumed to be an ongoing practice. But it’s easily lost in the ebb and flow of daily work. A formal midyear performance assessment increases the odds of timely attention to key issues.
2. They require managers and their subordinates to confront difficult issues they both might otherwise ignore. Lipman call this the “unpleasant cousin” of point No. 1. A prescribed midyear appraisal mechanism makes it less likely that conflicts will be avoided until it’s too late to effectively deal with them.
3. They make year-end evaluations easier. Comprehensive and well-organized midyear performance reviews create a blueprint for what lies ahead. Hopefully, key strengths and weaknesses will be aired and discussed, and end-of-year surprises will at least be minimized.
4. They can improve employee engagement. People want to know how they’re doing. If done candidly, fairly, and constructively, midyear evaluations offer meaningful feedback and help employees make course corrections by the year’s end.
Now that you’re at least considering adding midyear performance reviews to your lineup, what steps should you take? First, realize that HR leaders, team managers, and employees all benefit from a system that creates an automated, user-friendly performance review process. Reviewsnap is one of those systems.
Reviewsnap prevents the midyear review process from being a headache because it streamlines and automates the entire process. The same features that do that, which include automated self-reviews, ease employees’ anxiety about their upcoming reviews. The process actively involves employees and boosts employee engagement.
For HR managers, midyear reviews handled with a Web-based, automated solution like Reviewsnap afford customized performance reviews that truly align with organizational goals. They provide an opportunity at midyear to assess and possibly reset company and department goals, and track progress toward those objectives.
Midyear performance reviews — you owe it to your organization to consider them.