Confronting Employee Performance Issues
Most people find conflict uncomfortable. Delivering an annual performance review where problematic performance exists therefore requires managers to summon the courage to have those ‘tough love’ conversations with certain employees.
The discomfort generally stems from three problems: first, the manager has procrastinated with delivering the news, second, the manager has not recorded performance throughout the performance period, and third, the performance is subjective instead of objective. With a little organization up front, these problems can be avoided. The performance discussions can become much less stressful, and far more productive. The time can be spent on planning for improvements instead of fighting over interpretation of the past.
Timeliness is of the Essence
Many legal contracts include a statement that ‘time is of the essence’ to ensure the parties understand that delays are costly and cannot be tolerated. The same is true with confronting performance issues. There is no excuse for waiting until a performance review to discuss a performance metric that is trending in the wrong direction or demonstrated behavior that is less than optimal. Timeliness is critical when confronting issues.
Timeliness ensures that the facts will be fresh in everyone’s mind and that course corrections can be affected with less effort. If we wait to confront issues, the memory becomes far less accurate. The classic Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve illustrates the speed of forgetting. Ebbinghaus was a 19th-century psychologist who pioneered the study of learning and memory. If we wait for even 1 day to confront an event or behavior, people’s memory will already be down to 33% accuracy. If we wait a month, accuracy drops to 21%. It is critical to have accurate, and agreed facts when investigating a situation or when discussing performance issues. If we cannot agree on the facts, we don’t stand a chance of agreeing on a remediation.
Timeliness is also an issue in terms of reinforcement of goals, values, and priorities. If we want to confront a poor behavior or acknowledge a positive behavior, doing so immediately will have the best impact as it removes any confusion over what is expected. Timeliness is one of the critical factors in positive reinforcement to help build a values-based work culture. It is also just as critical when confronting poor behavior or performance. The longer we wait, the more muddled our message gets and the more room is created for misunderstanding.
Imagine an airplane pilot who takes off from one airport, sets their course, and then never corrects for wind direction and resistance. As the plane nears the end of its journey, a massive course correction may be needed to compensate for the variables during flight. To avoid this, pilots make frequent and minor course corrections to stay on track. We need to think the same way about performance. Frequent minor input will negate the need for a massive (and uncomfortable) course correction at the end of the period.
Document Performance Issues
While timeliness is important to stay on track, it is also critical to delivering performance reviews that we record information throughout the measurement period. If we fail to keep good notes, the Ebbinghaus Curve shows that we won’t stand a chance to remember what happened months ago! Performance reviews therefore often suffer from the bias of only including very recent information and therefore not being objective.
Early in my career, I was taught that the first three rules of being a supervisor were 1 – Document, 2 – Document, and 3 – Document. I no longer believe these are actually the most important things for a supervisor to do, however, they are important when trying to objectively measure and record performance without bias towards recent events.
SMART Objectives
So much of the stress of delivering performance reviews is sown right at the beginning of the process during the creation of goals. If goals are not well-written, then objectively measuring against them is impossible. The expectations must be understood and set up for success. Goals must be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timebound to be objectively evaluated. Do yourself a big favor upfront and ensure the objectives are well written!
When evaluating against a SMART goal, I’ve always taken a very literal approach. If the goal required for example ‘conducting 6 Kaisen Events for the Team,’ and 6 were conducted, then this performance meets the objective. If 7 or 8 were done, this exceeds. If only 4 were done, this performance falls short and that must be acknowledged as a rating of ‘did not meet the objective.’ This level of performance may be justified by circumstances that can be outlined and considered in an overall rating, however, this goal was not met. For the process to be consistent and fair, it is best to stick with a literal interpretation and not ‘justify away’ sub-expectation performance.
Delivering the News
If we’ve done our upfront work well, kept good track of events throughout the measurement period, and given frequent feedback (both positive and constructive feedback), the performance reviews become almost unnecessary and certainly far less stressful for both parties. There are no surprises as the employee has received frequent input. They can also measure for themselves how they have been doing. With SMART goals, there is little room for misunderstanding or misinterpreting. Unless we are going to warp facts, the performance pretty much speaks for itself.
The performance review conversation then becomes just a matter-of-fact review of the data and events recorded to ensure formal alignment. The dreaded conversation can actually become useful as a planning session for how to improve!
If you are dreading giving the formal performance evaluations to some of your team members this year, do yourself a big favor and do a better job up front on goal creation, and during the measurement period with good journaling and frequent feedback to the employees!
