Performance reviews may be tougher this year, as companies seek to weed out underperformers, and recipients need to be ready, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“Make sure every seat is filled by the right person,” is what businesses are now thinking, said Dave Carhart, people-strategy adviser at human-resources software company Lattice, in an interview with the Journal. In fact, performance management is the priority for nearly 40 percent of human resources professionals this year, the highest share in recent years, survey data from Lattice indicate.
Consulting firm McKinsey recently put about 3,000 staffers on notice with unsatisfactory performance ratings, people familiar with the matter told the Journal.
One source, Erik Post, was surprised that his review said he met, but did not exceed, expectations. Asked why he was not considered to be an outperformer, he was told that, despite impressive work at times, he was inconsistent on the more mundane parts of his job. That made him work to get better at the day-to-day of aspects being a team player.
Having moved to another industry, he now sets up meetings with his bosses to figure out how he can improve, he said.
Among employees who received the worst grades in their reviews last year, 38 percent had rated themselves as highly valued, according to data from BambooHR, a software company that provides performance-review systems to employers. That’s a higher portion of "unsuspecting underperformers" than existed prepandemic, according to the analysis of nearly 2million assessments that BambooHR conducted on behalf of the Journal.
“New managers, especially, will shy away from having the hard conversations,” Gianna Driver, said HR chief at cybersecurity company Exabeam, which uses role-playing exercises to train managers in delivering tough feedback, in an interview with the Journal.
The Journal offered a few examples of companies intensifying the review process. Khan Academy, an education technology nonprofit, increased the frequency of performance check-ins so that staff could more readily see how they’re tracking against their goals. Ethena, a compliance-training company, made tough feedback harder to ignore; it overhauled its review process by attaching colors to each piece of critical feedback to make it clear how severe it is.
While overly blunt feedback can be difficult to receive, executive coach Alisa Cohn advised workers not to respond in full on the spot. Instead, she suggested saying,: “This is a lot to take in. Would you mind if we stop now and have a follow-up meeting to continue this discussion once I have time to digest this?”
Another executive coach, Susan Peppercorn, told the Journal that sometimes bad feedback signals that it’s time to move on.
“If the manager seems very distant and doesn’t seem interested or invested in your career,” she said, “then you have to really think about: Is this a place I want to work?”