Pop Quiz: Can You Use "Mid-Year Review" & "Business Investment" in the Same Sentence?

If it's June, it must be time to remind employees and managers to meet for mid-year reviews. It's a tradition in most companies, but does it really get you anywhere?  I have rarely worked with a company that didn't feel that few, if any, managers took mid-year reviews seriously.

Part of the problem is that managers can easily develop a bad attitude about mid-year reviews. They reminisce about their struggles through the objective setting process that ended just a few months ago. Now that the employees' performance plans are completed and approved, managers just want to get the work done. They don't see why they should take the time to huddle with each employee again.

Where did the bad attitude come from? If you ask me, HR communications about mid-year reviews is the culprit. We tend to be specific about the need to address employee questions and concerns, but vague about the business rationale or outcome for the meetings.

2010 is a good year to turn this on its head. Instead of using your performance appraisal process as the context for mid-year reviews, dig deep into the business issues your company is facing with products, services, customers, technology. Check out how your stock has trended and learn why. Work with leadership to build an accurate, insightful business case that will educate managers and employees.

Then give managers the information and tools that will help them explain how the company's business plan is unfolding, what shifts have occurred and how their department is addressing them. Help them be as specific and detailed as possible about what each employee can do in the next six months to make their part of the organization successful.

If you get employees engaged enough on the business issues, they will be the ones to pull the performance plan out to see if it remains viable. No nagging. No sign offs. Just real enthusiasm based on the business investment that their manager has made in them, with your help.

Margaret O’Hanlon is founder and principal of re:Think Consulting.  She has decades of experience teaming up with clients to ensure great Human Resource ideas deliver valuable business results.  Margaret brings deep expertise in total rewards communication to the dialogue at the Café; before founding re:Think Consulting, she was a Principal in Total Rewards Communications with Towers Perrin.  Margaret earned her M.S. and Ed.S. in Instructional Technology at Indiana University.  Creative writing is one of her outside passions, along with Master Swimming.

Comments

[Vita Taylor]

Great idea and societal/business timing.
What an opportunity to tie business goals with those of the individual. Line of sight is always a difficulty, perhaps this practice could begin to get us closer to communicating and linking business performance with individual performance.
An HR Director that I know was recently hired into a new company. He asked his direct report employees that work for him, "what are your goals for the year; what have you been tasked with, and what are your challenges?" They answered that they were hiring/processing payroll/benefits - all the functional stuff - but no real tie to business goals. He later met with the CEO to relay his findings and confirm that there were no real business goals for his department during the remainder of the year. The CEO replied to the contrary, that there were a number of business goals that cascade to the HR department, and the CEO promptly shared them. Sometimes I think we get tied to our functional goals without consideration of the business goals or how they should link. So, this topic is right-on for today's challenges. And as you mentioned, a lack of communications is usually the culprit when it doesn't occur.

[Margaret O'Hanlon]

Vita, I love a compelling story! Thanks for sharing because the story illustrates how easy it is to get lost. Giving managers the ability to provide line of sight explanations as part of mid year reviews. Employees will get jazzed to see how they make a difference -- and managers and execs who have lost that strategic vision will benefit from the reboot.

[Derek Irvine, Globoforce]

Great post, Margaret. To me, mid-year reviews have even less of a value than annual ones, which I don't think much of at all.

I like very much indeed your approach of communication, information and alignment with business issues/strategies/status. How many times have we read that employees want meaning and purpose in their work. To many, meaning and purpose means giving them some context for their work/daily tasks within the big picture of what the company is trying to achieve.

That's why I advocate using strategic employee recognition as a tool of performance management -- reinforce what you want to see more of, but also very specifically (and frequently) tell people how and why those recognized efforts are important to the bigger picture. That brings the alignment you talk about.

http://globoforce.blogspot.com/2010/04/get-most-out-of-recognition-with.html