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Time to fess up. Giving performance reviews is not your favorite thing to do.

If you gave a review in the last year, can you measure if it has increased the performance of the person that received it?

If you were the recipient of a review in the last year, was it helpful?

Coaching your people vs. administering a poorly executed review is much more rewarding for the employee and the coach. First, let's look at some of the reasons to keep your workforce in top performance mode.

EMPLOYEE RETENTION

Marcus Buckingham got it right in his book, First Break All the Rules. He offered the following analysis of why employees stay with their companies. In paraphrased form, here is what he says:

Retention increases when employees:
1. Know what is expected of them.
2. Have the materials and equipment they need to do their work effectively.
3. Have the opportunity to do what they do best every day.
4. Receive recognition or praise for doing good work.
5. Feel their supervisor or someone at work cares about them as a person.
6. Have someone at work who encourages their development.
7. Feel their opinions count and their job is important.
8. Have the commitment to do quality work
9. Have someone at work talk to them about their progress.
10. Have opportunities at work to learn and grow.

So the bottom line is this: If you want to keep employees around, they need to like the company and know you care about them. They need to be engaged, to have the opportunity to do what they are good at and have meaningful relationships at work.

Accomplishing these goals can be approached with a process oriented plan. Once the ground work is laid, it can be sustained to help give your company a distinct advantage.

Establishing a strategic blueprint (Vision) is a useful framework to help all employees understand on a day-to-day basis why they are doing what they are doing. To visualize this, think of a cascading series of linked chains that is narrow at the top and widens as it gets to the bottom. (See Figure 1)

The top link is the company vision and mission followed by departmental visions and tactical plans, followed by individual employee goals that are aligned with departmental and company visions. The key here is alignment. Like Canadian Geese migrating south, every follower goose is pointed in the same direction and shares the same destination as the leader goose. They share the same vision — to get to a warm place for the winter.