Designing Your Review

Review and Check-In conversations are key components of a comprehensive performance management strategy and can yield actionable insights to drive your employees' growth.

As you think about building your review or check-in for your people, you may be tempted to start researching what questions to put into your review form, after all, that *is* a key deliverable.

But before you get too deep into thinking about the right survey questions to ask, think through what you're trying to accomplish so that your survey questions can serve the right purpose. 

Key themes that we see include:

• We want employees and managers to have more frequent feedback conversations
• We want employees to know where they stand
• We want managers to have a holistic understanding of how each employee is doing
• We want employees and managers to have alignment on goals
• Our review process is too lengthy, and we want to have a lighter-weight process
• We want to streamline and consolidate the number of tools we're using

Whether you work at a company with fewer than 100 people or more than 100,000 people, answering the following questions (and getting alignment from your team/executives) will help you articulate the purpose of your review/check-in to your employees, set their expectations, and help them understand the benefits of going through the process. 

Short-Term and Long-Term Objectives

• What are you trying to achieve with your performance program?
• If your performance management program is successful, what will it be doing?
• What behaviors will it drive?

Leadership Buy-In

• How do your leaders want feedback to happen?
• What is their goal of a performance program?

Cultural Observations

• How does feedback happen right now? What’s working well/not working well?
• How do employees interact with one another?
• How do employees get their work done?
• What feedback have you heard from employees about the current performance process?

Employee Familiarity with Performance Management

• How familiar are your employees with giving/receiving feedback?
• If your employees have never done a review, it’s important to choose something simple before making it complex
• If your employees are unfamiliar with how to write an effective assessment, they may need some training on dos and don'ts

Timing and Resources

• How long should employees and managers spend writing an assessment?
• How long should people spend on having the conversation?
• How many reviews/check-ins should people expect in a year?

For more detailed information on review design, please review the following PDF document!

Once you've answered the questions above, you're one step closer to bringing your review to life. We'll now explain each of the three review types you can select:

• Performance Review: Our most "traditional" review offering, the reviewing typically occurs between manager and direct report, but can include upward feedback. Performance Reviews are usually more structured and formal. This is often used in bi-annual or end-of-year evaluations.
• 360 Review: This offering is our most comprehensive review type. 360 Reviews includes peer feedback + nomination and approval process, with more involved action items falling on both employees and managers. This is also often used in a bi-annual or end-of-year evaluation scenario, and often takes more time to administer and complete than your typical performance review.
• Check-in:  Our most lightweight offering: Usually a 1 step release process between manager and direct report.

Below is a chart that lays out the differences in more detail. Configuration of these will get into greater detail here.

Note that with all three review types, you can also incorporate any goals that have been inputted into the system with them. We will go into more depth later on in this guide.