‘Onboarding: How to get your new employees up to speed in half the time’ - George Bradt, founder and Chairman PrimeGenesis

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Did you know that a strong onboarding process improves new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%? 

However, only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job at onboarding new employees. 

This clearly states that while employee onboarding has a direct impact on the bottom line, most organizations miss out on how to get it right. 

Don’t let that happen to you. To onboard new employees like a pro, keep reading.

What is an onboarding survey?

By definition, an onboarding survey is a questionnaire that is administered on new hires to gauge their initial experience and level of satisfaction, in an attempt to understand their engagement and retention potential. 

As an HR, you can get multiple insights from an onboarding survey, including:

• what employees thought about the organization when they heard about it for the first time
• how their impression changed over time 
• whether or not their experience aligns with their expectations, etc.

It can help you estimate how long the employees are likely to stay and how you can further optimize your onboarding process to make it more aligned with employee expectations. 

Why are onboarding surveys important?

An effective onboarding survey can help you reflect on your performance through the onboarding process, which directly impacts KPIs for organizational success, including:

1. Retention

93% of employers believe a good onboarding experience is critical in influencing a new employee’s decision whether to stay with the company. At the same time, 25% of a company’s new hires would leave within a year if the onboarding experience was poor. 

2. eNPS

20% of new hires are unlikely to recommend an employer to a friend or family member and an onboarding survey can help you identify the reasons for the same. However, new team members who were asked to provide feedback prior to their start date also had a 79% increase in willingness to refer others. Thus, illustrating how onboarding surveys and feedback can impact eNPS.

Read: How to use eNPS for better employee engagement

3. Satisfaction and Engagement

Employees with exceptional onboarding experiences are 2.6x more likely to be extremely satisfied with their workplace and 70% say they have ‘the best possible job’.

4. Performance

77% of employees who went through a formal onboarding process were able to meet their first performance goals. However, 49% of individuals who failed to reach their first performance milestone had no official onboarding instruction. An onboarding survey can help you determine the effectiveness of your onboarding process.  

5. Other

In addition, your new employees might also have an inclination towards providing feedback as a part of the onboarding survey, which you will lose out if you don’t conduct the same. Research shows that only 26% of new employees recall being asked for feedback on their candidate journey and the hiring process before their start date wherein 91% of new hires are willing to provide this feedback. 

Employee onboarding survey: Best practices

Now that you understand the importance of an employee onboarding survey, let’s quickly discuss how to effectively run an onboarding survey. 

1. Set the cadence

You must coincide your employee onboarding survey with important milestones for the new employee in the organization. Mostly, these milestones coincide with the end of the first few months. Thus, you should circulate your onboarding survey after 30, 60 and 90 days respectively, with different objectives for each. Furthermore, you can send interim surveys in case you feel the need, for instance, when the employee starts a project, or when the orientation process is over. 

“Effective employee onboarding isn’t about swag, stickers, & company value pamphlets on their desk the 1st day. But, how you help them understand their goals & how co values are interwoven in operating are more important.”- Suhail Doshi, founder and chairman of Mixpanel, Inc.

2. Identify critical areas and build questions

Based on the milestones or cadence you have set up, it is important to identify areas you would want to cover with each milestone. For instance:

In the first 30 days, you should focus on themes like: 

• Orientation process
• Initial thoughts
• Expectation alignment 
• Recruitment process
• Onboarding experience

In 60 days, you can touch on themes like:

• Knowledge transfer
• Level of engagement and satisfaction
• Induction process

By the end of 90 days, focus should shift towards:

• Manager support
• Role clarity
• Likelihood to stay
• Organizational alignment

Once you have decided the themes, you can start building questions, a snapshot of which is covered in the next section or you can download the template now here. The themes can be fluid across milestones, depending on the context for your organization. 

3. Roll out the survey for participation

Once the milestone arrives, you should roll out the onboarding survey and drive participation. It is important to explain to your new employees why the onboarding survey is important and how they can fill it up. Give them the requisite time, deadlines and communicate what will be the next steps to encourage them to participate. 

4. Follow up

Simply rolling out the survey is not enough. You must reach out to your new employees to remind them to fill the onboarding survey as amidst numerous new things, they might lose track of it. Don’t push too hard, yet send subtle reminders to get genuine responses. For instance: employee survey tools such as SuperBeings integrate with chat tools like Slack, Teams, Gchat to send personalized nudges to fill out the survey in the flow of work at set intervals as well as allows them to participate directly without switching context. 

Unlock a wide array of survey questions and employee analytics. See how SuperBeings can help

5. Take action

Once your onboarding survey responses are in, slice and dice them to get insights into what your employees feel and leverage the data points to further refine your onboarding process to facilitate engagement, retention and advocacy from the beginning. 

Sample onboarding survey questions for 30-60-90 day review

Taking cue from the section above, here are 50+ onboarding survey questions that you can leverage to gauge the pulse of your new employees as they complete different milestones.

You can also download these questions as a template and use it whenever you need. Click here to download

1. Onboarding survey questions for 30 day review

a) Onboarding and orientation process

1. How can we change or improve the onboarding process?
2. What did you like most about the onboarding process?
3. Was the orientation interactive and engaging?
4. Did the onboarding process meet your expectations?
5. Do you feel welcome and proud to be working here?
6. How would you rate the duration and quality of your onboarding experience?
7. How would you describe your first day?

b) Decision related questions

8. What were the top 3 reasons for joining this company?
9. Do you think those reasons have been met?

c) Technical training and knowledge transfer

10. Have you received the training that you were promised during your induction?
11. Did the training meet your expectations and was accurately described during the hiring process?
12. Is the training relevant to your roles and responsibilities?
13. Were adequate tools and materials shared during training to facilitate knowledge transfer?

2. Onboarding survey questions for 60 day review

a) Engagement related questions

14. Would you recommend the company to others in your network?
15. Do you see yourself working here in 2 years?
16. Do you feel motivated to come to work in the morning?
17. Do you feel prepared for your role?

b) Onboarding experience

18. Did the first 30 days of onboarding go as expected?
19. What is the one thing you would like to change from your experience so far?

c) Company policies

20. Are you clear on the different company policies shared with you?
21. Do you have any concerns about any of the policies that you would like to highlight?
22. Do you think any policy is missing that you think must be a part of our governance?

d) Questions about team

23. Have your team members been integral in smooth onboarding?
24. Have you been able to connect and collaborate with all your team members?
25. Do you consider your team members to be welcoming and inclusive?
26. What is the thing you would like to change about how your team works currently?

e) Reflection questions

27. Have you been able to achieve the goals you set out for your 60 days?
28. How has your journey been so far?
29. What has been your biggest accomplishment in 60 days?
30. What are some achievements you would like to ensure in the next 30 days?

3. Onboarding survey questions for 90 day review

a) Role and expectation clarity

31. Do you have an understanding of what is expected from you as a part of this role?
32. Is your role similar to what was communicated to you during the hiring process?
33. Do you have the necessary resources you need for the role?
34. Do you have clarity of your goals?
35. Do you understand how your work will be evaluated?
36. Does your role meet your career aspirations?
37. What do you think is the most difficult part about your role?
38. What excites you most about your current role?
39. Do you understand the importance of the work you do?

b) Organizational alignment

40. Do your values align with the organizational values?
41. Do you believe in the vision and mission of the organization?
42. Do you believe your ideas are valued?
43. Do you have clarity on the organization’s future plans and do you align with them?
44. Do you see yourself as a part of this organization 5 years from now?

c) Manager support

45. Have your conversations with the managers been effective?
46. Does your manager support your career aspirations?
47. Does your manager provide you with the necessary support to perform your role effectively?
48. Do you receive regular feedback from your manager?
49. Does your manager include you in key discussions, wherever applicable?

d) Other questions

50. What are some of the challenges you have faced so far?
51. Do you feel your onboarding was successful?
52. How can we help you in improving the overall experience?
53. Do you feel included and accepted by everyone in the team?
54. How do you see yourself progressing from here?
55. Do you have access to all the information you need?

Wrapping up (TL:DR)

By now, it would be very clear to you that an employee onboarding survey can help you in multiple ways to create a high performance culture. It can enable you to augment retention, engagement, satisfaction and advocacy among employees to ensure that there is minimal turnover and you are able to attract high quality talent. Ensure that you roll out an onboarding survey at 30/60/90 days frequency to check onboarding experience, knowledge transfer, manager support, role clarity, etc. 

You should focus on other forms of employee feedback on culture, training and development opportunities, level of engagement, manager effectiveness, workplace collaboration, work-life balance, among others. 

Finally, you should focus on leveraging technology and automation to add efficiency and effectiveness to your onboarding survey and process. 

Research shows, automating onboarding tasks resulted in a 16% increase in retention rates for new hires.

Thus, consider partnering with a survey platform which enables you to:

• Use science-backes best practices onboarding survey templates
• Track employee milestones automatically and roll out surveys on due date with zero to minimal manual intervention 
• Integrate surveys with existing chat tools for reminders and sending out survey questions
• Use NLP for decoding sentiments behind open comments to understand the reason behind each response
• Use other employee engagement surveys to get the whole picture of new hire engagement

Related Reading

How to use employee engagement survey comments

Best employee engagement survey tools in the market today

When it comes to performance management for employees, you would agree that feedback plays an important role. However, only offering positive feedback and appreciating the performance of your employees is not enough. You need to give them an equal amount of constructive feedback which is specific to ensure high levels of performance. If you feel that your employees may not embrace constructive feedback, think again.

Research shows that 92% of people believe that constructive feedback is effective at improving performance.

In this article we will help you understand how you can give constructive feedback and examples you can leverage. 

What is constructive feedback?

Constructive feedback is essentially a tool that most forward looking professionals leverage to help others in their team with specific and constructive inputs on areas where one’s performance can be improved. Put simply, if you have an employee who doesn’t pay attention to detail, constructive feedback involves helping them acknowledge that this is a problem area, and more than that, enabling them with the support to overcome the same. It involves not only identifying a performance problem, but also, providing action items and ways to address the same. 

Importance of constructive feedback

Now that you have an understanding of what constructive feedback means, let’s quickly look at some of the top reasons why constructive feedback is important. Constructive feedback:

• Improves performance: It enables your team members to understand how they can perform better with specific inputs on areas of improvement
• Reinforces expectations: It helps your employees clearly gauge what is expected out of them in terms of performance, and sets clear deliverables and measurement parameters to avoid any surprises during performance appraisal
• Boosts morale and confidence: It involves also appreciating employees for a job well done and illustrates how they can become a better version of themselves
• Facilitates employee stickiness: It ensures that employees see your organization which cares about their professional growth and encourages them to stick around longer, and even act as advocates for others.

Positive feedback vs constructive feedback 

When delivering feedback, you must understand the difference between positive and constructive feedback and ensure that you use both of them where they fit the best. Here a quick distinction between positive feedback vs constructive feedback:

• Positive feedback focuses on a job well done and highlights where an employee has excelled. Whereas, constructive feedback talks about areas of improvement and action items for desirable outcomes. 
• While positive feedback seeks to reinforce the positive behavior, constructive feedback focuses more on facts and traits.
• Positive feedback is a reflection of the past performance and doesn’t necessarily have a futuristic orientation, however, constructive feedback takes reference from the past to feed better performance in the future.  
• “Your presentation during the board meeting was crisp and informative” is an example of positive feedback. Whereas, “While your presentation was informative, you can focus more on articulation to ensure that all your research is communicated in a way that everyone is able to understand. Using pointers can help here”, is an example of constructive feedback.

In a nutshell, positive feedback is a reinforcement tool, whereas constructive feedback is a mechanism to facilitate development. 

How to give constructive feedback

With an understanding of the fundamentals of constructive feedback, let’s quickly jump to the best practices which can help you deliver constructive feedback in a nuanced and effective manner. 

1. Decide when to give the constructive feedback

The first thing you need to focus on is ensuring that the timing of the constructive feedback is ideal. For instance, a busy period when the employee is putting in a lot of effort may not be ideal for giving them feedback about their performance from three months ago. At the same time, ensure that you provide constructive feedback regularly and consistently, to avoid recency or primacy bias. However, don’t offer feedback when you are angry about their performance either. 

2. Set the context and build trust

Before you get down to giving the feedback, set the tone. Share with the employee the purpose of the meeting and make them comfortable prior to sharing your reflections. It is important that you build trust so your employees can share their perspective and don’t feel intimidated by what you have to say. 

3. Share your reflections

Once the context and tone is set, start sharing your reflections. Your focus should be on sharing what you have observed about their performance. However, ensure that you also share how the same is likely to impact their career growth as well as organizational success. For instance, if you are providing constructive feedback about missing deadlines, you can use the impact of losing clients for the organization and a casual attitude marker for the employee.

4. Give specific examples

When sharing reflections, use specific examples of when you noticed a particular behavior. For instance, in the above example, you can share instances of when the employee missed his/her deadlines. Ensure that you use examples which illustrate a pattern, rather than a one off incident, which is very uncommon. Furthermore, always use concrete examples and not interpretation of what you hear or see.   

5. Balance positive and negative

With constructive feedback, your focus should be on helping the employee improve their performance and work on their areas of development.

However, simply pointing out their weaknesses or negatives in their performance will not help. You need to also talk about some of the positive aspects of their performance and how those qualities can help them absorb and implement their constructive feedback. 

6. Be empathetic

Emotional intelligence is extremely important when delivering constructive feedback. You cannot be apathetic towards your employee when delivering the same. Put yourself in their shoes to choose your phrases carefully. We will share some examples in the next section. Also, use your EQ to read the situation when you are delivering the feedback. If you see that the employee is getting uncomfortable, take a pause and comfort them first. Read their gestures and body language to ensure that the employee is not feeling attacked. 

7. Don’t make it personal

Like it or not, constructive feedback involves pointing out one’s weaknesses and areas of improvement. However, you should refrain from equating the performance of the employee with his/her personality or whole self. For instance, if someone misses deadlines, encourage them to be more organized or prioritize important work, than labeling them as a procrastinator. 

8. Encourage response from the other side

While you are delivering the constructive feedback, you have to make sure it is a dialogue.

The idea is to give the other person enough room to share their side of the story.

Try to understand whether or not they agree with your feedback and how they perceive the same. They may share the lack of support or resources, which have resulted in a weak performance. Be open to some reverse feedback as well. Again, your EQ must be at play here. If your employee has an outburst, or reacts negatively, you need to stay composed and calm them down. 

9. Discuss potential solutions

Once you and your employee are aligned on the areas of improvement, the most important part of constructive feedback is to provide adequate solutions to address the performance challenges. Don’t give abstract or vague solutions like be punctual if the employee misses deadlines. Rather, give very specific and action oriented solutions which are directed towards a particular outcome. The idea is to collectively understand the cause of the weak area of performance and use concrete solutions to remedy the same. 

10. Create a time bound action plan

Now that you have shared some potential solutions, you must revise the top action items with your employee to avoid any confusion. At the same time, you should focus on creating a time bound plan with key milestones to ensure that development is taking place. Summarize what was discussed and how you will proceed from there. Best is to set up a date to review the progress to ensure constructive feedback is paid heed to. 

Read our article on Start Stop Continue Feedback to give action oriented feedback

20 Constructive feedback examples 

Here are top 20 constructive feedback examples that you can use during your next conversation. To make your constructive feedback more effective, we have also illustrated examples of what you should steer away from.

1. Communication skills

Example of how to give constructive feedback

I would really like to know how you have progressed on the tasks assigned to you last month. It would be ideal if you could share a progress update on what has been achieved with a small summary of challenges/ support needed at the end of every week to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Example of how not to give constructive feedback

You have not kept your team updated about your work, this is highly unprofessional.

2. Attention to detail

Example of how to give constructive feedback

I was going through the work you submitted last week and I can see you have put in a lot of effort. However, I could see that there were some small errors and inaccuracies in the report across multiple sections. I believe that if you proofread your work thoroughly before turning it in, it will reduce the number of iterations and improve your quality of work. 

Example of how not to give constructive feedback

You seem completely distracted as you have been submitting flawed and below average work, this will not be tolerated. 

3. Time management

Example of how to give constructive feedback

I understand that you are working on multiple projects, however, you need to ensure that the most important projects are not overlooked and their timelines are not missed. Therefore, I would suggest you create a list of tasks you are working on and check with the respective reporting managers on the priority and set clear expectations to ensure that no deadlines are missed. 

Example of how not to give constructive feedback

You have missed your deadline again, it seems like you are not serious about you work. 

4. Goal achievement

Example of how to give constructive feedback

I see that you have been able to achieve only a part of the goals that you set out for this year. Maybe you were trying to spread yourself too thin. I would suggest you reduce the number of projects you are working on and ensure that the goals you set you are able to achieve. Furthermore, you must be vocal about the support or resources you need to achieve your goals. 

Example of how not to give constructive feedback

Are you even serious about your work, your level of goal achievement indicates otherwise. 

5. Absenteeism

Example of how to give constructive feedback

I see that you have been taking some time off lately, without any prior intimation. Let’s try to understand if there is a particular reason for the same. We can work on your schedule to make it more flexible. 

Example of how not to give constructive feedback

You have been missing all meetings lately, this tardiness is not appreciated. 

6. Problem solving

Example of how to give constructive feedback

I see that you are excellent at execution of ideas. However, I believe that you need to focus more on coming up with solutions on your own. I would suggest participating more in the brainstorming sessions and coming up with solutions. Try to think on your own, before you reach out to others with the problem.

Example of how not to give constructive feedback

You lack any problem solving capabilities, and will be stuck to execution for the rest of your career.

Wrapping up

Constructive feedback is integral to organizational success. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Always use facts and examples to deliver constructive feedback
• Don’t forget to differentiate between positive and constructive feedback
• Make sure you have practical tips or suggestions 
• Leverage specific constructive feedback examples for specific performance problems, instead of being vague

Related Reading

50 top 360 degree feedback question examples

150 performance review phrases

While performance management has been a key priority for organizations, for a long time, year end reviews were considered to be the most effective way to facilitate the same. However, recently organizations are observing a shift towards continuous performance management with an introduction of the performance management cycle. This article will focus on different aspects of the performance management cycle and how it enables unlocking the potential of high performance teams. 

What is a performance management cycle?

Before going into the diverse aspects, you should first understand what a performance management cycle essentially is. If you have an idea of what continuous performance management is, you’re already a step ahead in the understanding. Performance management cycle primarily is a way or a model in which you evaluate or focus on the performance of your employees throughout the year. The idea is to break down the different elements of employee performance into different stages and focus on them consistently. It starts with setting goals and ends with rewards for a job well done, which leads to setting of new goals and the performance management cycle resets.  

Understanding 4 stages of the performance management cycle

While you may want to divide your performance management cycle into any number of stages, mostly there are four stages. 

Planning

The first stage, at the very beginning of the performance management cycle, focuses on creating a plan for the performance ahead. The idea is to have a clear understanding on what your employee must achieve and how you will eventually review and evaluate them. During the planning stage, you and your team member, collectively should:

• Set SMART goals of OKRs based on the performance expectations
• Have clear KPIs or metrics which you will use for performance appraisal
• Clarify how individual goals or OKRs contribute to organizational vision

Thus, the planning stage of the performance management cycle sets the tone for the year ahead and ensures there is clarity at all levels. 

Monitoring

Once the goals have been set in the planning stage, you enter the monitoring stage of the performance management cycle. This stage essentially focuses on ensuring that things are moving as planned. The idea is to ascertain that your team members are more or less on track for specific milestones outlined as a part of goal setting. Additionally, this stage will help you address any performance challenges that you may observe, sooner than later. Monitoring stage includes:

• Regular one-on-one meetings to review performance so far
• Providing feedback to your team members on what you think has been going well and what needs to improve
• Relooking at goals in case they are behind or ahead of schedule in terms of achievement
• Understanding the kind of extra support or resources your team members might need to improve their performance
• Having candid conversations with your employees on wellbeing, professional development objectives, and other factors which may impact performance, morale and engagement 

The monitoring stage essentially focuses on tracking the performance of your employees against the set goals to provide constructive feedback and help them perform better. 

Reviewing

The third stage of the performance management cycle comes into existence towards the end. It involves reviewing the performance and providing ratings based on the established KPIs and metrics. While this is the formal review process, if you have been constantly monitoring the performance of your employees, this will essentially be a consolidation of all the reviews and feedback shared overtime. While delivering performance reviews, ensure that you:

• Shed any performance review biases that might come your way, including primacy effect, recency bias, halo/horns effect, etc. 
• Give your employees concrete examples and facts to support your review, rather than being vague and ambiguous
• Should try to get 360 degree feedback and review for your team members
• Answer some of the following questions to create an informed review:

1. Did the employee achieve the goals set out?
2. What were the key enablers in their achievement?
3. Did you observe growth in the employee during the performance management cycle?
4. Did the employee share any concerns, and were they addressed?

Since you have been connecting regularly with your employees, the reviews will not come as a surprise to them, but will help you monitor the trends of their performance and guide the next stage for the employee’s professional growth. 

Rewarding

Finally, the rewarding stage in the performance management cycle acts as a culmination to one cycle and sets stage for the commencement of the next. The objective is to take into account their performance over the performance management cycle and create a culture of rewards and recognition to celebrate and appreciate high performance. Some of the quick ways to reward your employees include, giving them:

• Healthy increments and promotions
• Public appreciation through social media, company intranet
• Bonuses and other incentives
• Rewards like vouchers, gifts, etc. 

This stage is important to make your employees feel valued and motivate them to keep the performance going. It will also push average performers to step up their efforts and enable you to create a high performance culture. 

Why is a performance management cycle important?

Now that you understand the various stages of a performance management cycle, let’s quickly look at why the performance management cycle is important for your organization. It will help you:

• Clearly define goals and expectations from your employees to drive directed performance.
• Keep your employees engaged. When you constantly connect with your employees for 1-o-1 meetings and consistently take interest in their performance improvement, they are likely to feel engaged, satisfied and motivated.
• Address performance challenges preemptively and provide your employees with corrective actions, resources and support to bridge performance issues.
• Retain talent as employees who feel that their performance is being valued and receive regular feedback tend to stay longer at an organization. 

Top 4 ways in which performance management cycle leads to high performance

In addition to the above mentioned benefits, a performance management cycle can help you build a high performance culture in a number of ways. Some of the top aspects include:

Clarifies KPIs and metrics

What constitutes high performance can be abstract. For some, closing 5 deals can be high performance, for others, it might be closing 15. Planning stage in the performance management lifecycle will help your employees understand what constitutes high performance and thus, proceed towards it. 

Boosts recognition

A key part of the performance management cycle is the rewards and recognition. When employees feel their performance is being valued and recognized, they tend to double up their efforts, leading to a high performance team.

Facilitates communication and feedback

Monitoring and tracking followed by 1-o-1 conversations can help you communicate with your employees regularly. Not only will you track their performance, but will also listen to their concerns or challenges and offer them feedback. Such conversations and feedback have a positive impact on performance, leading to a high performance culture. 

Ensures appropriate training

One of the foundations of high performance is enabling your team members to undergo the right training. Performance management cycle can help you understand which training is important for your employees at which performance stage, realizing high quality results. 

Top tips for managers for effective performance management cycle

As a manager, there are several ways in which you can unlock the true potential of a performance management cycle. You are one of the key stakeholders who plays an important role in every stage of the cycle. Here are a few tips that can help you augment the effectiveness of the performance management cycle:

• Invite employee participation and make the OKR setting process collaborative and action oriented
• Provide constructive feedback to your employees, instead of being too sweet or too negative
• Help your employees access the right resources and training they need to meet their goals
• Give your employees a safe space to share their concerns and challenges
• Don’t micromanage your employees in the name of monitoring
• Be open about relooking at the goals in case of a misalignment as you move along the performance management cycle

Benefits of using a performance management tool

A performance management tool can significantly help you streamline your performance management cycle by offering the following benefits. 

Performance snapshots

Get automated performance snapshots of your employee’s performance over the 9 box grid to track performance trends over time and provide reviews without recency bias.

1:1 conversations

Leverage guided templates with AI based suggestions for your 1:1 conversations with employees during the monitoring stage based on performance over time. Receive suggested talking points for goal-centered conversations.

Compare performance

Look at historic feedback to see improvement in performance and compare performance over time. You can also compare performance of peers over specific parameters. 

Related Reading

How to create a high performance culture using OKRs

7 steps to effective performance management system

12 common performance review biases to avoid

Biases are common to all humans. If you look back at your day, you’ll realize that most of the decisions you made were based on some belief, prejudice or bias. While being biased is inherently human, its manifestation in some situations can lead to results which are far from ideal. And, that’s a topic we are discussing with this article, Performance Review Biases. 

Essentially, performance review biases and preconceptions, notions or beliefs that you may hold, which may consciously or unconsciously impact your judgment when you are evaluating the performance of your team members. Performance review biases, even if unconscious, can lead to serious implications for your team member whose performance is being evaluated. For instance, if you have a certain bias against someone, you might give them a poor rating, unconsciously, which might impact their promotion, increment and career trajectory. Thus, as a leader, it is very important for you to check if you have any performance review biases and introduce preventive strategies, wherever needed. 

Top 12 performance review biases to look out for

Let’s quickly look at the top 12 most common performance review biases that are observed in growing organizations, how they look like and how you can prevent them for your company. 

1. Halo effect

Definition: 

The Halo effect, like the term suggests, is when you put a halo over a person which is reflected in every perception you have about them. From a performance review bias perspective, it translates to a situation, where if a person has performed well in one aspect, you will have a bias that all other aspects of their performance are equally good which may not be the case. This suggests that their one good trait tends to overshadow all others. 

Example:

If an employee has shown attention to detail to a particular project, which resulted in positive outcomes for the organization, a manager may consider attention to detail as their primary trait and all other parameters of performance review will be negated. Chances are that even if the person is not punctual, misses deadlines, etc., the manager will still give them a higher rating, because their one trait that impressed the manager will overshadow the other performance incompetencies. 

How to prevent it:

To prevent the Halo effect, it is important for managers to evaluate the performance of their team members on multiple parameters and score them on each individually. In addition to the positive trait, you must objectively evaluate other factors which ultimately contribute to organizational success and assess the employee on a holistic level. This will ensure that one quality does not overshadow others, which equally determine the level of performance. 

2. Horns effect

Definition:

A counterpart of the Halo effect is the Horns effect. Here, one negative trait or performance parameter tends to bring down the overall performance review for an employee. If you have had a poor experience with an employee on a particular aspect, you may believe that they are overall a poor performer, which may reflect in your rating, despite them performing well on other aspects. 

Example:

If an employee missed a particular deadline due to some personal reason, a manager might build a perception that they are not serious about their work. The delay in delivery of work then becomes the only important trait and other positives are ignored or overlooked.

How to prevent it:

Like the Halo effect, the best way to prevent the Horns effect is by taking into account multiple performance parameters and to get a clear understanding of the reason behind rating for each individual parameter. This will encourage you or any manager to rationally review a performance rather than being susceptible to performance review biases. 

3. Leniency bias

Definition:

Leniency bias in performance review biases refers to a situation where you are more lenient in your rating, giving employees a higher rating than what their performance truly would yield. Leniency bias generally leads to overestimating the performance of some, resulting in the inability to differentiate average performance from top performers. Invariably, you may end up promoting some who still have room for improvement, while leaving others dissatisfied who truly deserve recognition and incentives. 

Example:

Mr X and Mr Y are at a similar level and perform the same role of running ads to drive online traffic. During the performance term, Mr X managed a traffic of 6000+ leads while Mr Y brought in only 1000+. Leniency effect kicks in when the manager rates both of them at a similar level, despite the difference in their outputs. Naturally, both of them will have similar increments and career paths, despite unequal efforts and results. This might lead to dissatisfaction, lower levels of engagement, and ultimately attrition. 

How to prevent it:

To differentiate between above average and top performance and to prevent falling prey to leniency bias, it is ideal to have a rating scale which increases the number of rating options after average. Instead of simply saying if a performer was average or above average, add options like excellent, high potential, high performer etc, after above average. 

4. Centrality bias

Definition:

Centrality bias occurs if you rate your employee’s performance just in the middle of the spectrum. This generally occurs when you find it difficult to make a decision and go with a safe option. However, like leniency bias, this is also one of the performance review biases which makes it difficult to differentiate between low and top performers. 

Example:

Centrality bias is evident if for a particular manager most employees have received the middle rating or the average review. In the case of a 7 point rating scale 4 is the most common rating received by many.

How to prevent it:

One of the easiest ways to prevent this performance review bias is to eliminate the middle option from your rating scale. For instance, if you follow a 5 point rating scale, you should move to a 4 point scale and eliminate the middle option of average. This will push your managers to give a below or above average rating, and help differentiate between different performance levels.

5. Recency bias

Definition:

Generally, performance reviews occur at the end of the year, and recency bias comes in if you take into account only the most recent performance of the employee as opposed to reviewing their performance through the year. Chances are if the performer delivered poorly in the end, their entire rating will be dependent on this performance if this bias is at play. This generally occurs because it is easiest to remember the things that happen most recently. However, they reduce the employees to a few weeks and overlook their contribution across the year.

Example:

If Ms Y brought in 3 new customers at the start of the year, resulting in 50 Lacs of business, however, she was unable to convert any clients in the last quarter. With recency bias, the manager will rate her performance below average or poorly, because of the most recent performance, despite having a worthwhile performance across the year. The manager will end up overlooking her performance in the initial months. 

How to prevent it:

Preventing recency bias requires adopting a continuous performance review framework. Here, you can focus on capturing performance feedback at regular intervals, when an employee achieves a milestone, completes a project, etc. All the feedback can then be consolidated to create an annual performance report based on which the final rating should be allocated. This will help you get sufficient data points to get a holistic performance view.

6. Primacy bias

Definition:

First impressions last. That’s the best way to define the primacy bias. It stands on the flip side of recency bias. Here, the first or the first few instances of one’s performance tend to influence the final performance review. Whether the performance has been good or bad in the beginning is what defines the final appraisal call. 

Example:

When Mr O joined work, he was a little under confident in a new territory and could only close 1 deal in the first two months. However, as he learnt more about the product, his performance improved and by the end of the year, he closed 5 deals in just 2 weeks. However, in the event of primacy bias, his performance review will evaluate his performance as poor because he was unable to make a lasting first impression. 

How to prevent it:

Preventing primacy bias follows the same principles as recency effect. The idea is to make performance feedback a regular practice where it is taken at pre decided intervals and sometimes after completing some important milestones. This will help managers to get a snapshot of performance over the year with clear points to avoid being fixated on one or two incidents from the very beginning. 

7. Similar-to-me bias

Definition:

As the name suggests, this is one of those performance review biases in which you may unconsciously give a higher rating to an employee who shares similar beliefs, skills, perceptions, etc. The rationale is quite simple, we tend to like people who are like us and often believe that the skills we possess are most desirable. However, this often leads to the creation of a homogeneous culture where diversity and inclusion don’t exist, leading to poor innovation and creativity. 

Example:

A manager Mr T has three employees reporting directly to him. Mr T is very process driven and appreciates the same quality to drive outcomes. While one of those employees, Ms S is also process driven, the others are not and all three have similar outcomes. With similar-to-me bias, Mr T is likely to give Ms S a higher rating because she works in the same way as him, despite equally good performance from the other two. 

How to prevent it:

As a performance review bias, the similar-to-me bias can be prevented by making assessments more objective and evidence backed. Encourage your managers to bifurcate performance reviews based on different parameters along with a reasoning behind each parameter. 

8. Contrast bias

Definition:

Contrast bias occurs when a manager is evaluating performance for more than one employee and the performance of one becomes the benchmark for evaluating the performance of others instead of the company standard. At times, despite performing extremely well, an employee might just get an average rating because of the goal or the standard being used, leading to low engagement and satisfaction. 

Example:

If the sales target for a team is getting 5 new clients individually over a period of 6 months and one employee gets 10 new clients and others get 7, 8 and 9. Contrast bias occurs when the manager gives an average rating to the employee who brought in 7 clients because it is lower when compared to the performance of the employee who brought in 10. Despite performing better than the company standard and goal, the performance of this employee is not considered up to the mark, because of contrast bias.

How to prevent it:

To prevent this performance review bias, it is important that managers set clear performance expectations at the beginning of the performance period and evaluation is done strictly according to those parameters. It is even a good idea to define performance evaluation based on different levels of achievement and managers must be encouraged and trained to review each performance in silos, rather than comparing one with another. 

9. Attribution bias

Definition:

You display attribution bias during a performance review when you attribute the reason behind a performance based on your beliefs and perceptions, rather than objective facts and logic. In attribution bias, we generally attribute our good performance to internal factors like hard work, dedication, etc. and poor performance to external factors like lack of support, collaboration. However, when it comes to evaluating the performance of others, we turn the tables. 

Example:

A classic example of attribution bias as one of the performance review biases is if Mr L has not been able to perform up to the mark and his manager has to evaluate his performance. With attribution bias, the manager, who might think Mr L is not hardworking, might believe that the reason for poor performance has been the casual attitude of Mr L, even if clearly, he wasn’t provided with the right tools and software needed for the job.  

How to prevent it:

To prevent attribution bias, it is important that managers clearly define the reasons they believe led to the good or bad performance and a similar exercise is undertaken by the employee as a part of self reflection. It is important to assess both internal and external factors and focus on continuous feedback from diverse sources to understand which factors have been behind the performance more than others. 

10. Gender bias

Definition:

This is one of those performance review biases which are clear by the name. It suggests that when it comes to performance reviews, women are often evaluated based on their personality and behavior, while the performance of men is evaluated on the basis of their work. This leads to a skewed understanding of the contribution made by both genders, resulting in unfair distribution of rewards and recognition. 

Example:

Suppose there are two colleagues who are being evaluated, Mr G and Ms K and both of them have had similar achievements, milestones and areas of improvement. A performance review which says Mr G has great coding skills and is able to write perfect codes in a short time, while Ms K has a pleasant demeanor and is able to collaborate with everyone well. While both the reviews are positive, the former one for the male employee is based on functional competencies, which yields better rewards and promotions for him, leading to gender inequality at the workplace.

How to prevent it:

To prevent gender bias, it is important to make performance reviews structured and objective. You may want to steer away from open feedback and give your managers a pre populated template with a few blocks. Furthermore, encourage your managers to quantify how each performer’s contribution led to organizational impact, focusing on behavior and outcome rather than performance itself. 

11. Confirmation bias

Definition:

All of us have preconceived notions about others and their performance. Confirmation bias occurs when you pay more heed to actions and information that confirm your bias about a particular performance than others which challenge your beliefs. Put simply, you are more likely to agree with opinions and facts which align with your evaluation of an individual’s performance, while negating those that give an alternate view. This gives a partial picture of an employee. 

Example:

If a manager believes that Ms B has performed well due to her high functional skills, punctuality and attention to details, you will give her a higher rating. If the manager received feedback from external resources reinforcing the same belief, they will add that to their narrative. However, if a contrary comment comes to the picture, a manager with confirmation bias might discount or completely ignore it. 

How to prevent it:

To prevent confirmation bias, managers need to think of their perceptions as potential truths and not the ultimate truths. An initial perception should be made, which should be confirmed or negated based on proofs and behaviors that come along the way, rather than the other way round. It is important to pay attention to and accept feedback that goes against one’s belief to get a complete picture of the employee’s performance. 

12. Idiosyncratic bias

Definition:

As a manager, you may have some functional competencies which you are great at. However, there might be others where you have limited experience and expertise. One of the performance review biases in this case is the idiosyncratic bias. Here, you may end up being more lenient towards those who possess skills that you may have limited expertise with, while being more strict with those who share common skills like you. Often the reason behind is that, when someone evaluates performance based on skills that one has limited knowledge of, even small achievements make an impression, however, when it comes to evaluating skills one possesses, the standard for evaluation goes up. In either case, the performance review is not holistic. 

Example:

There is a manager Ms H who is great at sales, but has limited expertise in building proposals and attention to detail. She has two team members working with her Mr T & Ms L, where the former has sales experience and the latter has experience in creating proposals with utmost accuracy. Idiosyncratic bias creeps in when unconsciously, Ms H gives Ms L a higher rating than Mr T, because the standards set for what constitutes good performance are based on her level of expertise. 

How to prevent it:

To confront and prevent this performance review bias, managers must be encouraged to go beyond rating them based on their performance and what they believe has been the impact they have created. It is best for managers to consider whether or not their performance left an impression where the manager would want to work with the employee again. 

Prevent performance review biases with performance management tools

As humans, we are inherently biased and unconscious bias training can go a long way into helping us keep our biases in check. However, to ensure that biases don’t impact performance reviews for any employees, it is best to implement a performance management tool to reduce their incidence. A performance management tool, like SuperBeings, will help you:

Aggregate performance snapshots over time

Prevent performance review biases like primacy effect and recency effect, etc. which rely on one a year bias prone 9 box grid assessment, by replacing it with a system generated grid based on performance snapshots collected throughout the year. Not only will you get a holistic view of the performance, your managers will also get a clear understanding of which employees need help more than others.

Create performance snapshots

Equip your managers with a pre-built customizable template to answer simple questions about employee performance and potential at regular intervals to get a true snapshot of the performance and improvement from time to time. This will help managers objectively review performance at the end of the year.

Collect reviews holistically

Get inputs from diverse team members with automation to get a holistic view of an employee’s performance. This will help reduce the rater biases towards or against any employee and ensure that the reviews are genuine and authentic. 

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While performance review biases are common, if you are able to prevent them, you will unlock a high performance culture which greatly recognizes and incentivizes good performance. Using a performance management tool can help you achieve the same. 

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“Every employee can affect your company’s brand”- Tony Hseih, Former CEO, Zappos

TL:DR

Employee NPS is a key component for your organization if you wish to create a culture which engages, motivates and inspires employees and encourages them to recommend it to their friends. Here are a few quick points that you should not forget:

• It helps organizations gauge the level of engagement and experience for employees by segmenting employees into promoters, passives and detractors (discussed later)
• eNPS is important as it helps in employee retention as well as facilitate fast and effective hiring by ensuring a winning employer brand
• It is best to conduct eNPS surveys on a regular basis to gauge trends over cycles and address fluctuations in real time
• To improve your eNPS, you must focus on understanding each segment of employees and taking appropriate action
• You must acknowledge that passives have a great potential of changing your eNPS and you should focus your efforts on bringing them up the score spectrum
• Finally, you must use eNPS as a means to boost employee morale and track level and reasons for disengagement

Now let’s get into the nitty-gritties of employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) and how you can use them effectively.

What is employee Net Promoter Score?

eNPS is or employee NPS is a measure of employee loyalty and how they feel about your organization. It is a scoring mechanism that employees can use to share their satisfaction/ dissatisfaction with the company culture, which in turn helps leaders to gauge the impact it will have on the organization. 

The advent of eNPS came as a result of realizing that employees have an equal impact on an organization as the customers

‍For instance, if any employee leaves a bad review or reports a bad experience about your organization, it might act as a deterrent for other high performing candidates from applying to your organization.

In a nutshell, eNPS is one of the top tools you can use to gauge how satisfied your employees are with your company culture and measure whether or not your employee engagement and other efforts are actually bearing fruits. 

How to calculate eNPS?

You can calculate the eNPS for your organization by subtracting the percentage of promoters from the percentage of detractors. Let’s quickly understand what this means. 

You will start by asking your employees to rate their experience on a rating scale of 0-10. You can have questions like ‘How likely are you to recommend the organization to your peers or friends, on a scale of 0-10’. We will talk more about potential questions in subsequent sections. Depending on their experience, your employees will share their rating. Based on the rating, you can segment your employees into three categories:

• Promoters: With a rating of 9-10; they are highly loyal, motivated and inspired and show full commitment to the organization
• Passives: With a rating of 7-8; they are generally neutral, while they are happy with the experience, their level of loyalty and commitment may not be as high as the promoters
• Detractors: With a rating of 0-6; they are generally dissatisfied, lack loyalty, inspiration and motivation and may not recommend the organization to others

eNPS= %of promoters - %of detractors

For instance, if your organization has a total of 100 employees and 61 are promoters, 18 are detractors and 21 are passives, then your eNPS= 61%-18% = 43

The higher the eNPS, the more advocates you have. This suggests you will have an ecosystem of high percentage of employees that are loyal, inspired, motivated and committed. 

Why does eNPS matter?

For growing organizations like yours there are several reasons why eNPS matters to create a sustainable workplace. Such as —

1. Get a picture of your employer branding

Research shows that the majority of candidates read six reviews before forming an opinion about a company and 70% of people look to reviews before they make career decisions

With employee NPS, you will know how likely your employees are to recommend your organization to others outside. This ensures employer branding which determines the quality of talent you will be able to attract. 

By ensuring a good Net Promoter Score from employees, you will be able to manage the reviews effectively. 

2, Identify your advocates in a simple and quick manner

Employee NPS is very easy to execute, fast and cost-effective. At the same time, it gives you a clear picture of who are the advocates for your organization vs those who are disengaged and are unlikely to make recommendations. This information has two-fold benefits:

• You can create personalized plans to engage the different employee segments based on results
• You can leverage the reasons your promoters or advocates list for high level of loyalty and focus on enhancing the same

3. Reduce employee turnover

It is very rare that an employee will one day decide to leave your organization out of nowhere. Often, the decision to quit starts in advance and can be attributed to several factors including disengagement and dissatisfaction. eNPS, conducted regularly, can help you anticipate potential turnover in advance, when the employee rates low on the eNPS survey. You can use this data to fine tune your engagement plan and identify and address specific challenges. 

🚀 Predict and prevent turnover with employee experience surveys by SuperBeings. Learn more 

4. Hire faster

As stated above, eNPS directly impacts the quality of the talent you attract. Similarly, it also impacts how fast you are able to close an open position. If you have a high eNPS, you will receive a higher inflow of applications because your organization will be branded as a preferred place to work. This higher number of applications will translate to faster interviews and closures. Invariably, this will prevent the loss of work hours between transitions. 

5. Gauge employee trends over time

Finally, eNPS can help you track employee loyalty and engagement over time. If individual and overall employee NPS increases, it reflects that your interventions are moving the needle. However, if the score drops, you may need to relook at your practices and understand the root cause. 

Employee NPS cycles

As mentioned before, employee NPS is generally measured with eNPS surveys. Therefore, like any other feedback cycle, your eNPS surveys should also follow a structured and cyclical approach. Here are to create an effective eNPS survey process —

1. Ensure anonymity

Make your eNPS ratings confidential and anonymous. Do not force your employees to give names along with ratings or do not disclose ratings of one to another even if you know who it is from. One of the easiest ways is to use a platform that doesn’t capture respondent data, except the rating. Anonymity will help build employee trust and ensure honesty in the rating received

2. Keep it short

Refrain from adding too many questions in your eNPS rating. A maximum of 2-3 questions is more than enough. While most organizations use 1 central or core question, you can supplement it with another one to augment impact. For instance, one question can be about probability to recommend, while the other could be on motivation, inspiration.

3. Make it frequent

Having an eNPS rating at regular intervals is important. Ideally, as a growing organization, you should have a monthly cadence. However, if that seems overwhelming, you can start with a quarterly rating, and gradually increase the frequency. 

4. Use a 10 point rating scale or open ended questions

While a 2 or 5 point rating scale can also capture data, a 10 point scale and open ended questions enable employees to be more specific about their answer by giving them more options to choose from. The deeper your eNPS survey insights are, the more accurate actions you can take to improve your score.

5. Follow up

Just because responding to an eNPS question requires one click, you cannot assume that you’ll receive 100% participation. You must follow up a couple of times. Using employee survey tools to increase survey participation rate can be useful here. For example, SuperBeings sends reminders and follow up nudges at preset intervals via existing chat tools (Slack, Teams, Gchat etc) directly in the flow of work to maximize response rate. 

6. Encourage authentic answers

Finally, you must encourage your employees to be honest in their rating. Anonymity will help you achieve this. Additionally, explain to your employees that the answers will not have an impact on their appraisal and their negative rating will not land them in a backlash. 

eNPS survey questions

As a best practice, you can start your employee NPS survey with a core question and then you could follow it up with a few open ended questions. Your first question must follow a rating pattern to get your employee Net Promoter Score. Some of the questions can be:

• How likely are you to recommend your organization as a workplace to your friends/ peers?
• On a scale of 0-10, how inspired do you feel to work at this organization?
• What is the primary reason for the score you gave?
• What can the organization do better to get a higher score?
• What is one reason that is preventing you from recommending the organization to your friends?
• What is one reason why you enjoy working here?

Here are a few best practices you can use while preparing your follow up questions:

• Don’t be too vague with your questions
• Try to keep your questions open ended to get support for your core questions
• Try to get specific answers with 1 or 2 instances

What is a good employee NPS score?

While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact score which can be considered good, there are a few ways to measure how well your performance has been on eNPS. 

If you look closely, by formula, your score can range from -100 to +100, depending on the ratio of your promoters and detractors. Generally, any positive score, that is, a score above 0 is considered to be a good starting point. This indicates that there are more promoters in your organization than detractors. This translates to the fact that more employees are likely to recommend your organization than those who will not. 

However, only a positive score is not the end of the story. While a positive score represents retention and recommendation, the higher the score, the greater will be propensity and impact.

Use eNPS benchmarks

Furthermore, you must also align your eNPS with other organizations in your industry. For instance, while 60 might be a great score, if all organizations in your industry have an eNPS of 70+, then you may need to relook at your numbers. 

Here, studying industry benchmarks can help. However, eNPS is not a data point that is publicly available that you can consume. 

At the same time, your own eNPS can also be a benchmark for you over time with an aim to increase every time. The idea is to track your own company’s fluctuation, positive or negative, to identify the reasons or interventions behind the same. 

Unlock top engagement survey question templates and advanced employee analytics. See SuperBeings in Action

How to improve employee NPS?

eNPS surveys can disillusion even the most people friendly organizations. It is not rare to have a survey score below expectations. But improving eNPS is easier than you think:

1. Capture eNPS regularly

You must have heard that what gets measured, gets improved. The same is true for eNPS. When you capture employee NPS on a regular basis, you can track fluctuations and gauge whether or not the needle is moving. You can get a real time picture of whether the promoters or the detractors are increasing. Furthermore, the fluctuations can help you identify how specific interventions or regular organizational activities impact eNPS. 

2. Share the results

No matter what the results say, share it with your team members. Even if you have a negative score, share it with the team to facilitate collaborative thinking on what is going wrong. This will help you create an image that you are truly listening to your employees and are taking action. After sharing results, follow up and communicate the next action steps so your employees know that their voices are being heard and impact is being created. 

3. Understand the rationale

To improve eNPS, you need to understand the rationale or the reason behind each rating. Here, you should ask follow up questions to your employees on what contributed to this particular rating. On one hand, it will help you understand the motivation or the inspiration for promoters as well as you will be able to identify what is stopping detractors from recommending the organization to others. 

Put simply, the factors mentioned by promoters can be augmented and focused on, while those from detractors must be addressed or resolved 

4. Take action 

Once you share the results and engage in collective brainstorming, you must take action. 

• Example 1: If the major reason behind low eNPS is lack of work-life balance, your focus should be on addressing the same, by facilitating workplace boundaries. 
• Example 2: If lack of career growth is stopping your employees from recommending the companies to others, investing in mentorship, learning and development, career coaching, etc. can be extremely helpful.

5. Communicate with all segments

If you think that you only need to focus on detractors to improve your eNPS, you are mistaken. While you definitely need to pay attention to them, the other two segments, i.e. promoters and passives must not be left attended. 

• When it comes to detractors, your focus should be on their pain points, how it translates to a poor experience and what you can do to reverse the same. 
• For promoters, while you may think they are happy, engaged and don’t require any intervention, you must not lose attention on them and focus on keeping their rating high. Furthermore, when you communicate with them, you will be able to get insights for long term strategies. 
• For passives, focus on understanding what would make their experience within the organization and the role even better and more meaningful.

6. Improve continuously

When it comes to improving your eNPS, there is no stopping point. Just because you improve your eNPS by 20 points, doesn’t mean you have reached the pinnacle, even if you are above the industry average. 

• While in the first few years of your employees’ lifecycle, you will focus on retention and loyalty by ensuring a positive score,
• In the later years, your focus should be on making the employees feel inspired, motivated and committed to unleashing high levels of innovation and productivity. 

7. Follow up with more comprehensive feedback

Employee Net Promoter Score must be a part of a more comprehensive employee feedback framework. The idea is to get more qualitative feedback and insights to compliment the score. You can use open-ended survey comments for this purpose. Such feedback will help you understand where the score came from and how you can take steps to move in the right direction. 

8. Understand the passives

Finally, to improve your eNPS, you need to focus on the passives. Based on the formula, you might think that passives have no role to play in eNPS. However, you must understand that they are just one point away from falling in the detractor or the promoter category. Here, your focus should be on moving them up the spectrum. Getting qualitative inputs from them is very important as they have some level of commitment and positive regard towards the organization already. 

How to use employee NPS for better engagement

With eNPS, you can turn employee feedback into a growth strategy both as a business and as an employer. Here’s how:

1. Boosts morale

First, employee NPS boosts the morale of employees who believe that their voice has value and is being heard. It makes employees feel included in the process of building the right culture. Employees who participate in eNPS come with a sense of pride as being a contributor to building the overall experience in the organization. It also comes with a sense of respect when an organization asks the employees for their perception.

2. Understand level of disengagement

Low or negative eNPS is a clear indicator of the level of disengagement. It shares an inverse relationship.

Lower the eNPS, higher will be the disengagement

Obviously, only when employees feel disengaged at work, will they not recommend it to others in their network. This can act as initial information for your organization to create strategic plans to reverse the trend. Furthermore, fluctuations in eNPS can be useful when it comes to sudden disengagement which may not be very apparent, but can lead to mass turnover. 

3. Gauge factors contributing to engagement

A deep dive into the qualitative aspects of eNPS can help you understand the factors contributing to engagement or disengagement. For instance, if a promoter claims that they gave a high score because of the focus on wellness, it becomes clear that wellness programs can augment engagement. Similarly, if the reason for a detractor is high workload, effective distribution can help improve engagement levels. 

Increase employee NPS with SuperBeings

Creating, communicating and analyzing employee surveys can be intimidating and time taking. To conduct eNPS in a comprehensive and hassle free manner, you can partner with SuperBeings. Here’s what you get with our employee engagement survey feature —

• Built-in survey templates: Reduce the time to create survey questionnaires by using science backed, best practices pre-built survey templates. You can customize them as you need.
• Choose the most suitable rating scale: You get full flexibility to customize each question by choosing from a wide array of rating scale options — 2, 5, 7 or 10 point scale, multiple choice and open-ended.
• Filter options for better comparison: For each question you can filter the responses at manager, department or org level and compare them on a single dashboard. Also, you get deeper insights into each question on the Insights tab
• Use comments for qualitative feedback: Understand the sentiments behind each response by looking into open-ended comments left by participants

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with our engagement survey tool. At SuperBeings, we are constantly trying to improve the engagement processes and make it easier for the people leaders. 

Need a helping hand? Talk to our product expert. 💡

“Most organizations fail to manage performance effectively because they fail to look into the system holistically.” - Pearl Zhu, Author of Performance Master

The impact of having an effective performance management system goes way beyond hitting quarterly targets, it also facilitates employee development, high levels of retention and a high performance culture. 

Yet sadly, most organizations do not spend nearly as much time and resources into planning and developing a wholesome performance management process as they do chasing goals.

In this article, we break down the components of an efficient performance management system and how you can achieve them in 7 easy steps.

7 tips for effective performance management

We spoke with several HR practitioners and below are the 7 steps they recommend to build a super effective performance management system.

But before that, it’s important to understand that — 

Improving performance is a collective responsibility. And it starts with shifting the mindset around performance — from appraisal to improvement, from annual to continuous. 

As HR leader and author of Nothing About Business says —

“Performance management is so tightly integrated with the business that Business has no option but to do it on its own.” 

1. Adopt a continuous approach

First, you need to start with a continuous approach to make your performance management effective. Simply relying on traditional approaches of annual check-ins, feedbacks and reviews will have limited impact considering the dynamic and volatile market ecosystem. To adopt a continuous approach for effective performance management, you should:

• Promote regular check-ins and employee pulse surveys
• Facilitate consistent and dynamic goal setting
• Foster a culture of constant appreciation and recognition
• Ensure frequent feedback, evaluation and interventions
• Set regular cadence to reflect on diverse aspects of performance management

Read our detailed article on Continuous Performance Management to learn more.

2. Capture performance feedback regularly

Next, a major component of strategic performance management is capturing and analyzing performance feedback. You need to ensure that your employees are offered adequate and comprehensive feedback on their performance and areas of development are worked on. 

You can use our Performance Review Phrases template for such performance feedback recommendations.

At the same time, there should be focus on seeking feedback from your employees for self evaluation and to understand what they feel about their work and the organizational culture as a whole. 

Here adopting an employee feedback tool can enable you to find success easily. It can help you to not only capture feedback, but also generate insights and share heatmaps on how certain areas of performance can be improved, which is essential for finding success with your performance management initiatives. 

3. Facilitate meaningful 1:1 conversations

A good performance management goes way beyond just reviews and evaluations on how the performance of an employee has been. You need to equip all your line managers and leaders within the organization to conduct powerful and meaningful 1:1 conversations with their team members. 

The right conversations have the potential to preempt any potential risk of turnover, drop in productivity, low levels of motivation etc.

Once you have been able to identify any potential challenge, you need to ensure that the conversations take a new avatar. The idea is to have conversations that can address the surfacing risks. 

However, conducting directed conversations on different challenges can be overwhelming at times. Therefore, you may want to leverage a guided 1:1/ Meetings tool to train and equip your managers.

4. Identify learning opportunities

Based on the feedback, conversations, reviews, surveys that you conduct, you will have a clear picture of what factors are promoting high performance and which ones are deterrents. The latter ones form the areas of development and learning opportunities. You need to identify these areas of intervention and provide your employees with adequate resources and support to hone the skills and competencies that are needed for effective performance. 

Pulse surveys can be an effective way to gauge employee sentiment on a regular basis. 

Frequent pulse surveys are excellent for understanding how employees feel about their current capabilities vis-a-vis their role and the external support they need.

Ideally, you can also look at industry benchmarks to understand the types of learning opportunities available for different roles and provide them to your employees. 

Thus, to make the most of your performance management, you need to identify and acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of your organization as a collective measure of your employees and work towards them.

5. Promote coaching and mentoring

While effective performance management requires learning and development interventions, it is equally important to focus on guidance via mentoring and coaching. Your employees need the right mentorship to help them navigate through professional challenges that may not require upskilling but a change in mindset. Here setting up a formal mentorship program can contribute to effective performance management. 

Read: How to use employee coaching to unlock performance

You can also enable your managers to provide the right mentorship and coaching support. You can count on SuperBeings to help you ensure the same. 

• On one hand, it offers opportunities for manager development with a focus on key leadership competencies that can enable your managers to become better leaders.
• Additionally, the guided 1:1 conversations act as a mass coaching initiative where gradually your managers will master the art of coaching and mentoring. 

6. Navigate collaborations

Undoubtedly, a key step for effective performance management is to navigate collaborations for different aspects of the employee lifecycle. You need to adopt the right tool to capture employee pulse, feedback, review, facilitate continuous performance improvement and much more. Fortunately, today you can find all these features in a unified solution to relieve yourself from the costs of different tools and the added administrative hassles. 

7. Ensure recognition and reward performance 

The last and the final step for effective performance management is to ensure that you recognize and reward a job well done. This will catalyze a high performance culture by positively reinforcing those who performed well and encouraging others to improve their performance in a bid to achieve rewards and incentives. A few things to keep in mind:

• Recognize efforts and results
• Track performance continuously to reward consistency
• Ensure that recognition translates to rewards, even if it is just an extra day off
• Encourage career planning and mapping to illustrate recognition

Importance of effective performance management 

Before we finish, let’s quickly discuss the tangible benefits you will get if you have a solid performance management system. This will help you build a stronger case for performance management and secure leadership buy-in.

1. Employee development

Efficient performance management can help you in facilitating the right development opportunities for your employees. Based on a combination of expectations, feedback and conversations, you can enable your team members to grow in their professional journey. This will also facilitate higher retention. 

94% of employees say they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development. 

2. Organizational success

Effective performance management has the potential to create an equal impact on organizational success. When the performance of the teams and individuals increases, it will invariably positively impact the organization as a whole. As employee performance becomes better, productivity, quality of work and other related parameters also improve and impact the bottom line. Furthermore, it leads to creation of a high performance culture. Research shows, that good company culture could help you increase revenue by more than four times

3. Strategic allocation

If your organization is growing fast, you may have financial and budget constraints to spend towards employee development and training. 

47% of HR leaders are not aware of employee skill gaps, and 60% of HR leaders say that building new skills and competencies will be their top performance management priority.

An efficient performance management process can help ensure that you are able to allocate your resources to interventions that actually make an impact and eventually monitor, track and measure the return on investment. 

4. Clarity of expectations

Performance management goes beyond feedback and performance evaluation. In fact, it actually starts with creating a clarity of expectations. 

Most fast growing organizations are chasing multiple priorities and this leads to a confusion among employees on what is expected out of them. In fact, only 50% of employees would “strongly agree” they know what’s expected of them at work. A practical performance management process can help you and your managers create a clear path for employees with a focus on OKRs to ensure everyone is on the same page. 

5. Better engagement

Finally, performance management sets the stage for greater levels of engagement and a better employee experience. When employees feel valued and believe that you are taking genuine interest in helping them grow, the motivation, morale and commitment is bound to rise. As a result, they will be more engaged at work which will eventually show in their performance, productivity and quality of work. The impact on the bottom line is also phenomenal. 

Companies with a highly engaged workforce are 21% more profitable

Get started with effective performance management

Use the following resources to get started on everything you have learned so far —

• 9 warning signs that you need a new performance management system
• 8 point checklist to choose the right performance management tool
• 8 best performance management tool available today

And finally, to see how SuperBeings can help, talk to one of our experts today.

It is no longer an assumption that the traditional approach to annual goal setting and review has run its course. The VUCA world demands more quick and adaptable business models.

While the agile values and methodology was initially created for software delivery, you can apply the same to transform how you set and achieve your business goals. 

In this article, we will focus on:

• Relevance of agile and OKRs in the VUCA world
• Importance of leveraging agile techniques for OKRs
• Best agile and OKR framework for growing organizations

Why you need to reimagine goal setting in the VUCA world

Traditionally, goal setting has been a very static and long-term process for organizations. Here are a few key components of traditional goal setting and performance management:

• Annual or multi-year goals with little or no interventions at regular intervals to realign on changing priorities
• Top-down approach — goals being set by those at the top with minimal inputs from those working on the ground
• Only annual feedback cycles and the inability to identify or address challenges in real time
• Lack of flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances or situations, which are uncertain and ambiguous

This form of goal setting and performance management had relevance for organizations operating in steady and stable market conditions. 

However, in today’s VUCA world, the pace of change is skyrocketing and organizations unable to tide with the same are finding it extremely difficult to survive, let alone thrive. 

Some of the reasons to reimagine goal setting for VUCA world include:

• Increased globalization requires businesses to be agile and adapt to changes at all times
• Focus on creating short term goals and action plans
• Need to relook at business priorities due to changing market conditions and customer expectations 
• Need to incorporate constant feedback from diverse stakeholders
• Need to focus on collaborative goal setting over top down command

Relevance of agile and OKRs for growing organizations

While it may not be apparent in the first look, agile and OKRs are quite complementary and combining the two can be a great step for growing organizations. Here’s why —

• OKRs can help you understand the end goal and envision what success will look like. 
• On the other hand, the agile methodology can enable you to create the right roadmap with frequent experimentation to reach the OKRs successfully. 

Here are a few reasons why you should combine agile and OKRs for your organization:

• Set shorter goals for each quarter with the flexibility to look at the results in real time
• Agile iterations based on learning which can be communicated across teams 
• Shorter feedback cycles which prevent investment losses that might occur if the whole project/ goal has to be reworked
• Continuous improvement with frequent retrospectives which can enable you to reflect on what is working well
• Focus on collaborative goal setting and performance management with team autonomy
• Agile approach to progress tracking

How to use agile techniques for OKRs

Now that it is clear why working agile and OKRs together makes sense for growing organizations, let’s quickly explore the top ways in which you can apply agile techniques to your OKR framework to make goal setting and performance management suitable for the VUCA world. 

Agile Value 1: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• Ensure collaborative OKR setting, assigning OKR champions and the right team members to execute the same
• Facilitate clear understanding and communication of the intention and expectation behind each OKR and the responsibility for every team member

Agile Value 2: Working software over comprehensive documentation

• Focus on clear outcomes and key results instead of comprehensive literature on why something is important
• Facilitate shorter feedback cycles to gauge challenges early on and ensure feasibility of the OKRs
• Reduce administrative overheads and complex processes related to OKR setting and progress tracking by using a simple, integrated OKR tool

Agile Value 3: Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• Ensure continuous development by taking real time feedback from internal customers i.e. stakeholders in the leadership

Agile Value 4: Responding to change over following a plan

• Facilitate dynamic planning over a static plan with quarterly OKRs
• Ensure adaptability to change, uncertainty and ambiguity
• Promote short cadence to gauge achievability and relevance of key results early on

Best agile and OKR framework

In this last section of agile and OKR for better goal setting and performance management, we will uncover the top framework. 

We have combined the best components of different frameworks like waterfall goals, delivery agile, scaling, full stack agile, into a single framework with 5 major components that can help you enhance the complementary potential of agile and OKR 

This approach can help you leverage the benefits of agile methodologies and OKR framework to impact all aspects of organizational structure for achievement of goals, including the culture, strategy, initiatives, tactics, etc. The framework is premised on:

1. Create value based OKRs

• Focus on creating value based OKRs instead of activity based
• Activity based OKRs are effective for specific projects, but for organizational goals, the focus should be on value
• Instead of focusing only on the outcomes, have a clear understanding about how each of the outcomes can create value for the organization
• The activities for each OKR should be a part of the agile roadmap and not the end destination

If you are struggling with combining agile and OKRs for your organizations, chances are you are focusing on activity based key results which often resemble agile steps, leading to confusion and inability to meet goals. 

2. Facilitate horizontal alignment for shared OKRs

• Encourage collaborative OKR setting with realistic timelines and short intervals
• Make OKRs team/ department specific and acknowledge avenues for collaboration and alignment between teams on shared OKRs
• Acknowledge OKR dependencies between teams and facilitate transparency and horizontal alignment
• Avoid splitting OKRs for a shared goal between teams, rather create opportunities for working together

For instance, if you have an event coming up and wish to successfully execute the same, the objective will be common, with specific value based key results for each team.

Objective: Successfully execute the 7th edition of our annual event

Key Results

• Get 1000+ unique registrations
• Raise INR 20,00,000 in sponsorship
• Curate 5 high impact panels
• Get 10+ media and affiliate partners
• Get 5000+ impressions on social media with organic promotion

If you look closely, while the objective is shared, key results are spread across sales, marketing, and even product/ services teams

3. Combine quality and quantity results

Your agile and OKR framework should enable you to get the best of both worlds when it comes to results. Agile results by nature are qualitative in nature and focus on the features that you wish to ascertain in a specific period of time. On the other hand, OKRs are driven by metrics. Thus, you can use a combination of the two for effective results:

• Use OKRs to validate goals set using the agile methodology
• Ensure each key result has a quantitative (data) and qualitative aspect (value)
• Use a combination of agile and OKRs to ensure that your progress is positively impacting the organization

The combination can help you create an ideal balance between outputs and outcomes which are both critical when it comes to goal achievement and performance management. 

4. Promote use of data

• Leverage data and evidence to create your agile based OKRs
• Instead of creating OKR based on leadership opinion alone, validate the same with market study
• Don’t rely completely on hypothetical representation, undertake primary and secondary research to ensure relevance and perceived achievability

Pro-tip:

Using data and not relying solely on opinions will help you set agile OKRs which don’t under or over estimate the goals. For instance, if the market data on traffic to a new website in your industry is 20,000 clicks in one week, your OKR can focus on reaching 25,000 to make it aspirational but achievable up to 80%. 

However, if you set the target at 50,000 or above, it will become too far fetched and the team might not even strive for it. On the flip side, if the target is only at 10,000, it will not encourage your employees to push the boundaries. Thus, you need to replace opinions and command OKRs with data backed experimentation.

5. Build self organizing teams

• Provide you teams with a clear idea of what the larger vision looks like
• Encourage them to set their own OKRs and help with a direction to achieve the same
• Facilitate team autonomy and empower your team members with the right tools and resources like SuperBeings to not only set OKRs, but also track progress in real time and grade them at the end of the cycle. (Learn more)

Self organizing teams are important for growing organizations as they proactively take onus and ownership of achieving OKRs and lead to a greater degree of success. Step away from controlling detailed plans for each OKR and encourage the leadership to provide direction. 

Wrapping Up

To conclude, if you combine agile and OKR, you have for yourself a clear model for success which you can easily apply to goal setting and performance management. Having the right technology to support your rapidly changing businesses processes is a must for any organization looking to thrive in a VUCA world. With SuperBeings you can:

• set, track and update goals/ OKRs whenever you need in just one click
• update goal progress quickly and directly in the flow of work (via Slack, Teams, or other chat tools you already use)
• have goal based 1:1s and performance check-ins to understand where your employees are stuck
• align all internal stakeholders with the constantly changing needs of the organization easily
• and much more

💡If interested, you can talk to one of our product experts to find out if SuperBeings can help you solve your specific challenges. We keep the call short at 15 minutes.

Like most fast growing organizations, you might also be leveraging the OKR methodology to set, implement and facilitate effective goal setting to maximize growth. If not, you should start using OKRs ASAP.

OKRs not only provide an excellent goal setting framework but also drive high performance when implemented strategically. Most importantly, with enhanced goal visibility and transparency, OKRs ensure that everyone is on the same page which is the foundation of a cohesive and high performing culture. 

In this article, we will discuss 8 ways in which you can adopt the OKR methodology to build a thriving company culture.

Use OKR methodology in 8 ways

1. Focus and clarity

A high performance and thriving company culture is based on the foundation of clarity and focus. When there are 100 things to focus on, your employees will eventually lose sight of what’s actually important and might feel burdened with non-priority tasks. This will lead to a poor employee experience and limited productivity, both situations that prevent an impactful culture.

However, when you apply the OKR methodology, you will be able to limit your focus on 3-5 top priorities which will attract attention, energy and efforts across the organization. You will then be able to create a high performance culture by dedicating all your resources to the key priorities to realize impact. 

2. Collaboration and alignment

A culture that thrives on collaboration, teamwork and alignment is one which creates maximum impact. The OKR methodology can help achieve this in an effective manner. On one hand, everyone is clear about their role in the OKR achievement, which makes collaboration seamless because everyone is on the same page and no one steps on the shoes of others. 

On the other hand, OKRs can help your employees align their responsibilities and tasks with the overall vision of the organization, motivating them to contribute to the big picture. 

To learn more about how to align teams using OKRs, read this

3. Agility and resilience

Recent times have shown that uncertainty and ambiguity will continue to mark the new normal. Thus, a culture of agility, resilience and responsiveness is critical for fast growing organizations. The OKR methodology can help achieve the same. 

OKRs are cognizant of the changing environment and have the flexibility to be adapted to the same. 

More importantly, you can leverage the OKR methodology to foster a culture that focuses on outcomes and is not fixated on the tasks to achieve the outcome at hand. 

4. Continuous engagement and reflection

One of the top challenges of building a great company culture is a siloed approach and annual reflection. This leads to surfacing of major risks and problems which result in high rates of attrition, absenteeism and lower levels of motivation, productivity, etc. 

However, the OKR methodology adopts an approach of continuous engagement and reflection. You can create a regular cadence to check OKR progress for each of your team members, even daily is effective. 

This continuous engagement and reflection can enable you to preempt risks before they surface and leverage the power of communication to address them in real-time. Invariably, a culture built on continuous engagement leads to greater impact and high levels of performance as well as employee satisfaction. 

5. Transparency 

The lack of transparency is one of the key obstacles for many fast growing organizations that seek to create a thriving company culture. A way out often seems difficult to navigate. Fortunately, the OKR methodology can help address this challenge as well. When you use OKR, especially with the support of an effective OKR tool, you can facilitate high levels of transparency. 

Everyone in the organization will not only know their role, but also will have a complete view of the level of performance for others. Such transparency can help you increase coordination of efforts and give everyone the visibility of what’s happening across the company. 

6. Non-hierarchy

You may agree that most fast growing organizations these days seek to replace a strict hierarchy with a more flat organizational structure that facilitates inclusion of diverse ideas, thoughts and opinions. However, many struggle when it comes to actually implementing this thought. 

Adopting OKRs can solve this problem.

By nature, the OKR methodology is based on a collaborative foundation where a top-down approach compliments a bottom-down approach for goal setting. 

This suggests that while the skeletal structure of the goals might be laid down by those in the top leadership, you can give all employees the freedom and autonomy to create OKRs for their teams and verticals. 

When your employees participate in setting the OKRs they have to execute, the level of ownership is much higher. Thus, you can leverage the OKR methodology to create a thriving culture built on greater ownership and a flat organizational structure. 

7. Open communication and feedback

With a focus on continuous engagement and reflection, the OKR methodology can help you facilitate open communication and feedback. Many studies have shown that a culture that facilitates regular feedback along with open channels of communication is more likely to thrive than one which does not. 

In the OKR methodology, when you constantly track your OKR progress (download our free template for tracking OKRs), you will be armed with data backed insights to offer regular feedback for your employees. Furthermore, you can also leverage the same to start meaningful conversations with your team members in case you feel that there is any kind of disconnect. Such open communication can help you create a truly inclusive culture when employees feel their voice is heard. 

8. Accountability and recognition

Finally, a company culture that thrives has two major components supporting it, accountability and recognition.

• On one hand, only when your employees are accountable will they give in their 100% to create a high performance culture. 
• On the other hand, if you don’t recognize the efforts of your employees frequently and in an effective manner, they are bound to feel demotivated with a lack of encouragement, leading to a poor employee experience and culture. 

The OKR methodology is an answer to both these challenges. 

• First, being regularly reviewed, tracked and organization wide visibility makes accountability a given for fast growing organizations leveraging OKRs. Since everyone knows what the other person is responsible for, there is a development of a culture of accountability. 
• Second, with regular tracking, monitoring individual progress becomes seamless for managers. Invariably, they can track the performance of their team members and recognize efforts in real time. This leads to a culture of recognition which is bound to see high levels of engagement, motivation and satisfaction. 

Empower your culture with the OKR methodology

Now that you know how the OKR methodology can help you in many ways to create a thriving culture, it is also true that as a fast growing organization with multi-pronged focus, leveraging OKRs is a challenging task. To address the same, you can collaborate with an integrated OKR tool like SuperBeings to automate the OKR adoption and maintenance.

With SuperBeings, you get to — 

• Keep OKRs at the center of your business activities by aligning everyday tasks 
• Reduce friction in goal management with zero context switching (by integrating Slack, Teams and Gchat)
• Stay ahead of risks with a bird's eye view on key OKR status as well as compare progress over time with automated daily OKR tracking
• Connect OKRs with Meetings tool to automate OKR check-ins and empower managers with data-backed AI driven actionable templates for meaningful conversations

Learn more about the OKR tool here. Otherwise, to see this in action, book a quick call with one of our experts. Also, get all your questions answered on the same. 

See Also

How to Run a Successful OKR Progress Review  

The complete guide to adopting OKRs (PDF)

Master OKRs in just 10 days: Free email course

With performance management becoming a critical part of organizational success, giving effective employee reviews is becoming a crucial part of a manager’s responsibilities. While regular employee performance reviews focus on illustrating the strengths and what worked for employees and the organization at large, there needs to be an equal focus on areas of development in case of poor work performance. 

If you look closely, writing negative employee reviews is often considered to be more difficult because the words need to be chosen very carefully. It needs to have a developmental tone rather than a critical one. 

What are negative employee reviews?

As the term suggests, negative employee reviews are reviews delivered to employees who have underperformed and need to be pulled up to the expected levels. It involves a variety of components which include:

• Problem statement i.e. an illustration of poor performance, how it has been manifested and its impact on the overall organizational success
• A clear understanding of the level of performance which is expected
• A potential way or action items to correct the poor performance and improve

To get actionable ideas of how to deal with poor performance issues at work, read this

Writing and delivering negative employee reviews is very important for any organization that seeks to maintain a high level of employee performance. It is critical to ensure that:

• Poor performers are aware of their level of underperformance and have a clear picture of what’s expected from them
• Those who are underperforming get an opportunity to improve or face the consequences of consistently performing poorly
• Underperformers are given the right support and guidance to improve their work and efforts to meet the expectations

Why should you be cautious of your words?

When you are writing negative employee performance reviews, you need to be extremely cautious of the words you choose. Using the right words will help the receiver acknowledge and work on the suggested points, while using words that are too harsh or critical can lead to adverse consequences. There are a few reasons which make the choice of words extremely important. 

• The right words can help negative employee reviews focus on the developmental aspects and the impact of poor performance on the organization, rather than criticizing the person in general
• They can help ensure that the job and the performance are the focus of the employee reviews and not the character or the personality of the person
• Being cautious also ensures that the negative employee reviews don’t have a negative impact on the mental and emotional wellbeing of the employee and are taken in a constructive spirit.

The same review when offered with the right words can be more powerful and have a larger influence. 

For instance a statement like ‘you interfere too much in the work of others’ can be seen as a personal attack and may yield a defensive response from the receiver. 

However if you frame it in a different manner like ‘if you give others greater autonomy and freedom to work in their own way, you will be able to inspire greater creativity and innovation’, you will be able to put your message across and also help your employees understand how it will make a difference. 

Download: Free guided 1:1 meetings template to get personalized meeting recommendations

Tips for writing negative employee reviews 

In addition to being cautious of the words you use, there are a few other tips which you must keep in mind while writing negative performance reviews, including:

1. Keep it crisp and structured

While giving negative reviews is difficult, don’t beat around the bush and get straight to the point. However, instead of directly saying what isn’t going well, try adopting the sandwich approach. Start with a positive comment, add areas of improvement and end it with some suggestions and action items. 

Example: Tina has an excellent eye for detail and is very dedicated to her work. However, she often misses the deadlines which has led to a delay in 30% of her projects resulting in poor client experience. It would help her performance greatly, if she is able to prioritize her work better and keep an organized calendar for timely delivery. She can consider using the latest project management tools to facilitate better prioritization. 

2. Don’t get personal

Second, negative employee reviews should focus on the job or the role and not the person specifically. Steer away from using words or phrases which may end up combining performance and personality of the person. Your review should be specific towards performance challenges and not generalize that performance challenge is a personality trait.

Example: Instead of saying, “you are not punctual”, you can say that “I have seen you arrive late for meetings frequently, leaving shorter time for discussions. It would be best if you could be more punctual to respect others' time and make the most effective use of the same.”

3. Focus on progress

When you are writing negative performance reviews, you must focus on the progress and how a change in behavior and attitude can help them in the long run. Simply mentioning what went wrong and the associated process might lead to demotivation. 

Example: Some of your work has had grammatical errors in the past, maybe because you were trying to complete a lot at once. I am sure if you prioritize some tasks and create an action plan, your work quality will be better. 

4. Offer facts

Don’t simply give negative employee reviews about the problem area, but back it up with facts and data points. This will help you illustrate a pattern and establish that your review is not based on a single incident. Also, it will make your review more credible and authentic and not just a few words strung together. This will also help you in being very specific.  

Example: It has been observed that 40% of your customers claim that you don’t have adequate knowledge of your product, leading to a poor experience. 

5. Give examples

There might be some performance parameters which are difficult to add quantitative data points to. In such cases, you can offer specific examples of underperformance, especially if it has been repetitive. It is ideal to have at least 2-3 instances of poor performance to make your point stronger. 

Example: It has been noticed that in the aspiration to get your work perfect, you end up delaying projects. It was observed in project X with client A, project Y with client B as well as when the internal submission for Z was due. 

Pro-tip: Use our free Performance Review Phrases template to get 50+ examples of writing a negative review positively

How to deliver a poor performance review?

Once you write the negative employee reviews, you exactly know what you want to say to your employees. However, the way you deliver it also has a big impact on how it is received. To make the process simple, we have compiled a list of some of the best practices to help you deliver a poor performance review in the best way possible:

1. Connect in person

If you are delivering a negative performance review, it is best to do it in person, or if your team is remote, over a video call. If you deliver it over an email, you cannot be sure of the tone and context in which your words will be read. 

It might backfire by being read as more critical than developmental as per the intent. Furthermore, when you are delivering the negative reviews face to face, you can also use your gestures and body language to facilitate authenticity and empathy. 

2. Steer away from yelling

No matter how poor the performance has been, when you are delivering negative employee reviews, you should stay away from yelling or using foul language. Since the focus is on facilitating development for your employee, yelling will only defeat the purpose, making the employee demotivated and pushing them towards even lower levels of confidence and motivation. Furthermore, it will negatively impact your organization from an employer brand perspective. It can also create a negative impact on the wellbeing of your employees. 

3. Add anecdotes 

While delivering the review, you may want to add some personal stories or anecdotes if you have yourself been through something on those lines. This will help you connect better with your employees and make them trust you more. Furthermore, it can enable you to illustrate how they can turn poor performance into something better with a live example in front of them. 

4. Make it a dialogue

Your negative review shouldn’t be a monologue where you deliver what you have written with the employee absorbing it as a passive recipient. Instead, make it a dialogue by putting forward questions to understand the reasons behind poor performance and how you and the organization as a whole can help turn the table. Hearing their side of the story is extremely important before deciding on the next steps. 

4. Create a safe environment

When you are delivering negative employee reviews, you need to create a safe environment. It should not be harsh and the employee should feel comfortable in receiving what you have to offer. Also, make sure you deliver the review privately and not publicly shame your employee. They should see it as a developmental conversation in a safe environment, where they can also voice their opinions. 

5. Make it regular

Finally, negative employee reviews need to be regular and not come as a surprise to your employees at the end of the year. Regular reviews will give your employees enough room to improve their performance. Furthermore, it will give them a clear picture of what to expect when the year closes. 

To learn how SuperBeings can help you have guided conversations around negative performance review with AI recommendations based on performance and goals history as well as maintain a steady cadence to maximize the impact of such conversations, see this

Offer suggestions and follow up

After you have delivered the negative reviews to employees, the natural next step is to create a plan for improvement to help your employees reach the level of performance you expect out of them. This is a critical part of the performance management and talent development process for employees who have been consistently underperforming. Here are a few ways you can help your employees improve their performance.

1. Create action items collaboratively

If you have reached this level of negative employee reviews, you and your employee would be on the same page about their level of performance. Thus, it is best to create a list of action items that can help them improve their performance. To create the next steps, you must:

• Ensure the steps are specific and not generic which only state the objective
• Create steps which are aspirational, but achievable at the same time
• Ascertain that there is an intended result for each decided step
• Collaborate and brainstorm with your employee to create action items which are agreed upon by both
• Align timelines and other factors to achieve success

2. Document the next steps

Next, your focus should not only be on planning the action items, but documenting them as well, because once they are out of sight, they’ll be out of mind. Furthermore, documenting them will help you remember the agreed steps and track progress every now and then. 

Clearly document what needs to be achieved, by when and how. It can be a good idea to encourage your team members to constantly document their experience as well to help discuss what has been working well and what needs to improve. 

3. Draft a Performance Improvement Plan (PiP) if needed

Depending on the performance issue, you may want to introduce a performance improvement plan for your employee. It is a formal tool to address performance challenges which outlines specific goals and expectations along with clear actions that need to be undertaken over a duration of 30-90 days.

For more details on PIP, check out A guide to implementing a performance improvement plan (PIP)

4. Set up a cadence

You also must set up a cadence to discuss performance improvements or challenges once the next steps are agreed upon. Unless you connect regularly to discuss the status, you might find yourself at square one at the end of the next performance review period as well. 

Depending on what needs to be achieved, you can set a weekly, fortnightly or monthly cadence to connect with your poor performers. While it may be seen as a regular review, it will also act as a reinforcer for them to ensure there is some improvement everytime the cadence to meet comes up. 

5. Define metrics

When you are determining the next steps, it is important to identify the associated metrics as well. For instance, if you want your employee to become more detail oriented, your metric can focus on reduction in errors by a specific percentage over a specific duration of time. 

The metrics will help you measure whether or not there has been an improvement in the performance as desired or not. At the same time, the metrics will help your employee move towards a specific goal. 

6. Follow up

While you have a set cadence, you may also want to check-in or follow up from time to time to make your employee comfortable enough to reach out to you in between your cadence for connecting. The follow ups can be over emails or calls or simple messages to check if everything is on track and to offer them any support whichever is needed. Especially in the beginning, you may need to check from time to time in case there’s any additional support that the employee needs to work on the action items. 

7. Evaluate progress

Finally, to ensure that your negative employee reviews translate to impact, you must focus on evaluating progress. Use the metrics you defined to gauge the level of progress and document it whenever you evaluate the same. This will help you establish a trend over time. 

Furthermore, if you feel the progress is below expectations, try to understand the rationale behind the same to check if putting the employee on a performance improvement plan will make more sense. 

Wrapping Up

By now, you must have gained a clear understanding of how to write, deliver and follow up on negative employee performance reviews constructively. If you are keen to learn how best to connect negative performance issues with regular 1:1 meetings with your team members with technology, book a quick demo with one of our executives. We would love to show you around :)

See Also

How to use Start Stop Continue feedback framework for high performance

10 performance review tips for managers that actually work

How to use employee coaching to unlock performance