The #1 Habit to Make Performance Reviews Effective

Do you know how many of your employees don’t feel valued? Our Employee Engagement Report uncovered that almost 80% are going into work every day feeling unvalued. So why not kill two birds with one stone and flip this stat around? Use performance reviews as an opportunity to give your employees a well-deserved high five.

Tangible Thank-Yous

Who doesn’t like balloons and gift cards? But of course, that’s not what we’re referring to when we say “tangible recognition.” While it’s a best practice to say “thank you” to your employee once in a while, you need to let them know why you’re praising them.

So while you’re evaluating your employee’s performance, use the recognition they’ve received from their peers to acknowledge their accomplishments. Did they nail a project? Or perhaps they doubled their monthly quota several times. Giving employees a reason behind your praise lets them know what they’ve done right so they can repeat that successful process in the future.

Leveraging Peer-to-Peer Recognition

Managers are super-busy people, and they don’t always get a chance to see all the great deeds done that warrant recognition. So turn to their peers. In fact, colleagues want to give out recognition, according to our internal research and our 2014 Engagement Report:

• 44% of employees use peer-to-peer recognition tools when made available
  

• 54% of millennials wish they had a way to recognize peers for a job well done

Use a peer-to-peer recognition tool. Make it easy to use and always digitally accessible. That way, the recognition becomes a real-time tool that avoids playing the waiting game like performance reviews. Employees can instantaneously give a shout-out any time, anywhere, to their colleague for a job well done.

So what’s in it for you? Because you don’t get the chance to see day-to-day operations, you can leverage the recognition that your employees sent to their peers. You’ll be able to use the recognition as examples to evaluate how someone has gone above and beyond.

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