Improve How You Review and Improve Your Employees’ Work

Performance evaluations get a bad rap – especially the dreaded annual review. Employees don’t typically enjoy seeing a year’s worth of work reduced to a checklist or spreadsheet, while management doesn’t like to see their teams so stressed about the process.

Even if your company has instituted concepts like check-ins and one-on-ones that occur more frequently during the year, the big annual assessments have the potential to put everybody on edge about their jobs.

At G&A Partners, we regard this process as a premier growth opportunity for both employees and management. For your company to perform at its peak, your employees need to consistently perform at theirs. An effective evaluation process provides employees the feedback and direction they need to align their best efforts with your company’s biggest goals.

Rather than a stressful time, annual reviews should be your company’s chance to recognize accomplishments and opportunities for improvement at the individual and corporate level. If your company wants to breathe fresh life into its performance review processes to the benefit of employees and management, here are 4 key ways a PEO can help!

1) Clear Processes

Although every employee is different, with different needs, goals, and communication styles, you should always begin each review using standard procedures. A good PEO can provide a neutral starting point for your company built on HR best practices so you can remove as many biases as possible and evaluate each employee using according to the same standards.

Following a defined set of actions also keeps you honest and on an even keel. It gives you the room to investigate the detailed nuances of how each person performed throughout the past year, while offering a path forward to a more productive experience for everyone.

2) Tools for Year-Round Organization

For tip #1 to be successful, you need reliable information from throughout the past year. With a PEO (and the technology systems they often provide) on your side, you have access to a wide range of data points you can use as performance metrics, including like timesheets, eLearning courses, certifications, goals, and more. A PEO can also help you create methods for increasing employee engagement, devising better goals, tracking productivity, and improving how everyone provides feedback to one another.

At G&A Partners, our clients can take advantage of a user-friendly, web-based performance management system that allows them to conduct meaningful online employee reviews with ease and time savings in mind. Managers can even set clear departmental and individual goals and then track progress towards each goal by entering comments and attaching documents to an employee’s profile at any time.

With this ongoing record of employee performance at your fingertips, you enjoy both a deeper understanding of the areas in which your employees excel and access to opportunities for improvement. Ultimately, it creates a review process environment that encourages more meaningful feedback.

Tools of this nature set the stage for a worthwhile review process. When employees and management understand where, when, and how the company is progressing throughout the year, those big annual reviews won’t be nearly as scary.

3) Accountability

Employee trust is huge for any company, regardless of size. Your employees want to know they can trust you with their jobs and careers. If they believe the performance review process is broken – whether for everyone or skewed to a select group of people – you will have a hard time attracting and retaining good employees.

A PEO can serve as your primary resource for performance management guidance, as it can provide HR expertise you can lean on to bolster your own efforts and ensure you remain compliant. More specifically, a PEO can help you develop objective guidelines for how performance reviews are conducted and reported, especially in terms of what results you want to see from the review process.

Need help preparing for a difficult conversation with a low-performing employee or coming up with a strategy to link bonuses or raises to data-driven performance feedback? Your PEO has your back.

Knowing your performance review process is designed around best practices gives you more confidence in the process. In turn, this helps your employees trust that what happens in the review process will benefit both them and the company.

4) Time in Your Schedule

Like most HR-related tasks, you likely don’t have enough hours in the day to redesign or implement a brand-new performance review process. (You may barely have enough time in your schedule to remember to eat lunch.) That’s time and energy you should be spending improving your product, caring for your customers, and leading your employees.

When you team up with a PEO like G&A Partners, you improve your overall time and resource management, which leads to enhanced performance evaluations. They’ve already done the “heavy lifting” of creating processes and strategies for effective employee reviews, which gives you can skip the headache of setting them up and instead get right into securing the feedback and insights you need to optimize your team.

If your business wants to do a better job reviewing the performance of your employees so you can recognize your top performers and identify who might need more support, a PEO can help you deliver key tactics and techniques for creating positive and productive performance evaluations.

At GA& Partners, we deliver a comprehensive back-office solution for your human resources, benefits, and payroll needs. Are you ready to conduct performance reviews that really matter? Let’s talk!