Common Mistakes in Employee Performance Reviews

As an employer, you are likely to conduct performance reviews to evaluate your employees. Most performance reviews formally appraise your employee’s performance and provide your employees with feedback. Where your employee’s performance has improved, or they have met certain performance metrics, you should recognise them. Likewise, you should identify where and how each employee has room to improve. However, employers often make certain mistakes when conducting employee performance reviews. These mistakes can impact morale, decrease efficiency, and, at worse, open you up to an employment tribunal claim. Therefore, you should strive to avoid these mistakes, the most common of which this article will explore.

Ill-Preparation

As an employer, conducting reviews for each of your employees can be time-consuming and energy-intensive. You may therefore dedicate less time to preparing for each one to save time. However, this often results in unproductive meetings for both you and your employee. Your employee is unlikely to take the review seriously if you seem unprepared. The review may make them unmotivated and lower their morale. This, in turn, could affect your productivity.

Reluctance to Pass On Negative Feedback in Performance Reviews

Even the best performing employees almost always have room to improve. On the other end of the spectrum, you may have certain employees whose performance is not up to your standards. In either case, you should treat performance reviews as a forum to air these concerns. This is easier said than done — many of us do not like to give negative feedback (just like most of us do not like to receive it). But ignoring it during a performance review means you lose one of the most effective places to deal with underperformance or identify room for improvement. As a result, any problems may persist, which in turn drives down productivity. 

Uncomfortable as it makes us, you should ensure you evaluate all aspects of an employee’s performance, including the negative. Of course, the best way to do so is tactfully and sensitively. 

Not Highlighting Success in Performance Reviews

Some line managers overemphasise areas of concern while neglecting to highlight examples of good performance. But you should always strive to let your employees know where they are succeeding, ideally with specific examples. Even if your business awards success through bonuses and other financial benefits, this is no substitute for crediting success where it is due. This boosts morale and improves performance because your employees know what they are doing right. Likewise, employees are more likely to act on negative feedback if it is complemented with praise. 

You should strive to keep any positive feedback strictly related to your employee’s performance on the job. This is to say that comments about their appearance are unhelpful and irrelevant. At worse, you risk sexually discriminating against an employee. 

Failing to Contextualise Performance Reviews

Employers often treat performance reviews as something so intrinsic to the workplace that they tend to gloss over its function. Employees, in turn, treat it as an administrative formality without bearing on their day-to-day performance. This can result in your employees failing to engage with the process without understanding their role. 

Instead, you should always take the time to remind your employees why the business values performance reviews. Additionally, you may wish to include detailed reasons for holding performance reviews in your employee policy. You do not need to necessarily remind each and every employee during their respective reviews. Instead, you can hold seminars before the review period to remind employees why they are important. 

Making Feedback Too Generic

When you carry out your employees’ performance reviews, you may wish to think about how exactly how to assess them and on what basis you provide feedback. A mistake employers often make is the use of an arbitrary scoring system to measure their employees’ performance progress. As a result, your employees may feel

• threatened by their score; 
• demoralised, for instance, because they feel like a number and not a team member; or employee workforce knowing they are a number score; and
• frustrated because they perceive it to be arbitrary. 

Of course, you will need indicators to standardise and measure performance, but these must be suitable for your employees and your business. 

Key Takeaways

Most employers conduct performance reviews o monitor staff progress, identify areas for improvement, and pass on positive feedback. This article has covered a few common mistakes you can make as an employer when carrying out performance reviews, such as forgetting to give praise, avoiding negative feedback, and using generic feedback tools.

If you need help understanding common mistakes made when doing performance reviews in the UK, our experienced employment lawyers can assist as part of our LegalVision membership. For a low monthly fee, you will have unlimited access to lawyers to answer your questions and draft and review your documents for a low monthly fee. So call us today on 0808 196 8584 or visit our membership page.

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