Lia (00:00)
For your employees, one of the most dreaded, dreaded moments of the year, or twice a year, or quarterly, whatever frequency you do them at, are employee reviews. Like literally fill people with dread. They feel like, aah if I get this wrong, what does that mean for my career? Is it done for me? Do I do I cut off the future that I have been dreaming about? And I say that because if you are not taking seriously
How stressful employees can feel about reviews, then you're not gonna set them up right to demystify the process. And it's gonna be this whole thing that takes everyone's focus away from the work for like weeks at a time. And so today at Managing Made Simple, I'm gonna talk about how to demystify the employee review process and structure these conversations in a way that instead of being stressful, really allows you to come away with a plan that your team member is owning and they feel accountable to.
All right, let's do this.
Coming from working in big tech at Microsoft at Google, employee reviews were like the literal most stressful thing ever. And if you're in a corporate company, you might have experienced this too, where they are this major milestone where they, if they happen twice a year, you're building a
Anybody listening that works in a corporate team understands the perils of the employee review. I remember when I worked at Microsoft and at Google, the employee review would take people offline for weeks, trying to write the perfect self-assessment, trying to capture every little granular achievement in the right way so that they wouldn't feel like they like missed an opportunity to showcase what they did. Then managers would meet for weeks to calibrate people to make sure that they
really kind of vetted them against other people, and there'd be decisions made on promotions and and ratings and all sorts of things. This kind of system created so much stress, so much anxiety. And companies like Microsoft or Google, other places, they they constantly looked at like, how can we improve this process? Because it is so stressful. And I'm sure, you know, what whatever kind of company you're at, if it's a large one, the employer reprocess is this thing that creates a ton of dread.
Now, for you as a manager, why does it create all this dread? Because you're preparing these, you're writing your own assessments, you are you know, having to give feedback to someone that maybe doesn't want to hear it, all of these things. And if you're a business owner, maybe you haven't even thought about how to have an employee review. Maybe you haven't done it, maybe you've done them inconsistently, maybe you are just the same of not wanting to have a conversation with an employee and them kind of see, not see eye to eye on where things are netting out.
So employee reviews are so stressful because they're like the ultimate moment of feedback. And if it doesn't go right, it's like we had this one moment of giving the perfect feedback and the person didn't hear it, and now they're mad and now they might quit. Like, yuck. Okay. It's spiral central. Now, one thing I learned from working in a company like Google where the review would take people like they would be it would be all consuming for weeks. And actually, they did change the system before I left. So
You know, I don't really even know exactly how it is now, but there was a time when it would take like people would be focusing on it for weeks to get the perfect kind of everything written up in the perfect way. And in when I saw that at Google, what I did was I got really passionate about working with employees, working with my peers, I should say, and helping them write their self-assessments. So helping them own their impact, own their achievement, articulate their accomplishments in a way that wasn't
A laundry list of bullet points that nobody cared about, but really land the impact. Now, ironically, this became one of my signature keynotes, owning your impact, that I give all over the world for people to really feel like, hey, I'm gonna teach you a method for how to nail a performance for you by landing the why, not just the what, right? The impact, not just the effort. and so I do a lot on the employee side, but for you as the manager.
you have a lot that you can do too to make this experience like go well, not be so stressful. And in the New Manager playbook, I share a framework for performance reviews, which is just to simplify the whole thing. And even if you have a pretty rigorous, you know, like laborious, I should say, I think they're all pretty rigorous, but even if you have a laborious perceived to be laborious review process in your company, you can still demystify it.
By really, you know, reminding your employees that a review is about two things: looking backwards and looking ahead. And more so looking ahead at how can we set you up for whatever goals you have? How can we give you the feedback that you need so that you feel supported, so that you feel clear and you know the path you are going on. If you explain that to your employee, it starts to make it a little bit less stressful. Now,
Are they gonna believe you if the only time you ever gave feedback is during the review? And no, they are not, right? So there's some legwork leading up to this, which is having regular feedback conversations, having the sit-down. Remember, where you have a structured conversation, 30 minutes, where you take responsibility. Hey, I haven't stopped to sit down and meet with you, or we've been really busy and I want you to know that I'm aware of that. Step two, you give the specific feedback or recognition. Step three, come away with an action plan.
If you are having regular sit-down conversations and feedback conversations and making sure someone is really clear on where they stand and what needs to change or what they should keep doing to keep crushing it, then the performance review in and of itself is way less stressful. Okay, that's already like you have done 80% of the work because there's not going to be any surprises. But I've been there.
When I was managing folks in corporate, I felt like the review was still really stressful, even if I had been giving weekly feedback to my employees. So I'm not trying to say this is not a stressful thing for you as a manager. But what made it easier was that there was no surprises. Now, how be along with, hey, these are the goals we want to look back and look forward, like how do you structure the conversation? Well, I think the length of the meeting is really important. If you set aside an hour.
If you set aside more than that, it it makes someone feel like there's this like massive conversation where you have a laundry list of things to go through. You want to leave enough time for the conversation, but it doesn't have to be, you know, I think 30 to 45 minutes is is enough, right? You're looking through how did things go? Let's talk about the wins and let's talk about the things you've been working on. And then the next part is let's look ahead. What are some of the goals? What are some of the things that are on, you know, the key priorities?
And what are things that you want to keep developing in order to achieve those goals? Or if there was some stru struggles, like how are we going to keep making sure that you are improving on those areas? That, my friend, is the whole conversation. And when you structure it this way, now it's easy to pull these things into routine one-on-ones or check in, hey, like every quarter and just be touching base on it because it's very, very specific. This is what you set out to do. Here's some of the things that you're improving or areas that you're developing in.
We're on the same page. Now, if you are in a situation, I I I whether if you're building out your own performance review process, I do suggest that you create a self-assessment of sorts. One page, right? Not 17 pages, where an employee outlines their key projects that they focused on, like what were they doing over the last six to 12 months, whatever time cycles that you're using, you know, what were the big wins? Obviously, tying metrics to it is very helpful, right? What what did
they?
You know, what KPIs did they hit? you know, so summarizing the wins and then summarizing things, maybe one or two things that, hey, this didn't go as well, or something I learned, something that I'm working on, right? And having your employee practice both summarizing what they do concisely, making sure things are tied to a KPI or a metric that's important for the business and the team. And then
Being self-reflective, like, yeah, there is something that you could be working on. Everybody has something they could be working on. And so that's getting them into the rhythm of self-reflecting, continual improvement, learning from mistakes. And I think you can learn a lot about a team member, especially the longevity that they'll have in your team or in your business by what they put on the areas I'm developing or lessons learned. Because I will tell you.
Nine times out of 10, maybe that's too much, but like let's call it seven times out of ten, it's the low performers that write, everything went fine, I have nothing to learn. And it's the 10Xers and the star players, they're like, I messed this up, I messed this up. They're more self-critical because they are on a continual learning journey. And if you have someone that isn't very strong and they have no concept of it, and they have to take in no responsibility, or you've given them all this feedback, this happens to a lot of my clients.
You've given the feedback a bunch of times and they don't even mention it in the performance review. They're like, yeah, no, Effing's been great. Like to something to improve. I guess I could yeah, like I think people usually make up general, I could be prioritize my time better, like some like general bucket that like everybody could sort of do. If they're not willing to get specific there, you are getting a ton of insight on is this person maybe a long term fit?
Does this person need, you know, coaching on like how to think about their career goals? Is this person really invested? So this self-assessment piece, which is pretty commonplace in a large company, if you're thinking about how do I, you know, do a review process, I strongly encourage that. And and to show someone an example of it, maybe you write one up for yourself as an as a model, it should be one page. Because again, when I worked in big tech,
People would write like 50-page documents for their self-assessment for like a six month period of time. That's unnecessary. It's stressful. And it makes you, the manager, completely unclear on what they thought was important. So part of actually doing a good job of it is being concise, is being brief, is surfacing like the most salient things to show. Now, so that's that is the structure of the self-assessment, the conversation. You know, you'll go through.
what you know the past and and going forward. And now your feedback, it's gotta be just like best practices of feedback specific. Right. If there are things that you are you've already brought up, you've already mentioned, you already talked about, remind them of that. Hey, we had a couple conversations around deadlines and you know that's continued to be a bit of a challenge. Over the next six months, over the next year, whatever the cycle is, this is my expectation.
So you have a really fantastic opportunity in the performance review to reiterate things that you've already talked about, to re to align around wins. Hey, you have been showing up in a fantastic way in our client presentations. They've come to really rely on you as that sounding board, as that, you know, person they go to when they have questions in the next six to 12 months. My expectation is you keep really developing this as a skill.
And then in the future, potentially you're owning client relationships, right? So you're reinforcing what needs to change or what needs to continue. And then the last thing about the conversation is when there's action items, when there's things that someone should be taking forward, developing, you're asking them, okay, so what are you going to do? When should we come back together? What are you going to flop on? You're leaving the ball of the actions in their court.
That's how people take ownership over improving or keep doing something or whatever it is, is they own that follow-up. You're the manager, but you've delivered the feedback. If there's something that you said, I need to find you something for that, okay, cool. But in general, the conversation should be on them. They're owning, okay, I'm gonna look for a course or a training in this. I'm gonna find a conference, I'm gonna you know, kick off a project around that. They are owning the follow-ups, they're owning the actions.
Now, months ago, I was attending a like a a webinar collection of HR consultants and ops consultants, and it was about performance reviews. And when someone asked in this chat, do are performance reviews really necessary? Do you know what if I just don't want to do performance reviews in my company? Do we have do that? And a woman who was a HR
Manager at a startup. She came off mute and she said, I suggest that people don't do performance review until they absolutely have to. I always advise my clients, no performance reviews, do not do them. They're just a headache. They're just administrative. And my blood was boiling listening to this. I was outraged. And I didn't want to interrupt. There was like a hundred people on the call. I didn't want to like interrupt it and and, you know, embarrass this person or you know, cause a scene. I wrote in the chat.
I've found them to be very useful in in my case, working with hundreds of businesses, working, you know, in in all different fields. So I just like to offer another perspective. So I was very civil, my friends. But the reason my blood was boiling is because one of the number one reason people quit. So high turnover is your most expensive problem. It costs you between 50 to 200% of someone's salary to rehire them. It's a freaking nightmare, right? For you, for the rest of your team.
If you have to hire new people. One of the number one reasons people quit is because they feel undervalued, right? The great resignation, when you look at that data, why are people leaving? And a huge reason, especially senior women leave the workforce, is contributed to what they call a broken wrong in the ladder. They don't see how they can get to the next level. That is solved by having performance conversations. Like your biggest turnover headache is solved by having performance conversations.
And I don't care if you have one employee or 10,000. When someone comes to work and they are trying and they are doing a job, they want to know where they stand. They want to know where it's going for them. They want to know when, you know, how am I doing? When when is the promotion possible? When is a raise possible? Your employees, again, even if someone is working 10 hours a week at the front desk and most of the time they spend on their phone, that person
Kind of no wants to know, like, hey, is this is is there something here or not? And I'm I know I'm exaggerating with that one, but literally, your employees are hungry to know where they stand. And so to believe, I don't need to tell them where they stand because I don't want to deal with it. I don't I feel like it's an average. I feel like blah, blah, blah. That is about you. It has nothing to do with them. And so if you've made a simple process that's easy to follow, like, hey, here's a one-pager highlights.
Things you're improving, c goals for next time. We meet, you know, for 30 minutes. I give you some specific feedback. If you make it that simple and straightforward, then like literally you have no reason not to do it. It's not administrative headaches. It's creating documentation. If you have someone that's struggling and you need to have some documentation to make some decisions around, like there's literally no downside. And so, I was pretty de devastated. It's like really strong, but like I was like,
Outraged. I was upset that this person was advising other folks not to do something that your employees are hungry for, that they are asking for, that they want because you don't feel like doing it. And the other the other thing this woman said was, yeah, I don't, I don't implement any performance system until the employees are asking for it. It's like this is they are working in your company. You're you're like having them ask you for HR systems.
Like that's crazy. That's not your employees' responsibility to have to ask you for that. They should be in a company that has these like very s simple, like rhythm of business things that are already set up. Like they should get the regular paycheck when they've been told it would come. They should have if it requires email, like a working email address, right? A computer, if that's you know what I mean? Like performance review is like just general business hygiene. It's I see it to be a requirement.
And with my small business owner clients, even literally if they have two employees, we implement it and the employees are bettered for it and they're happy and they feel clear and they know, okay, this is what I've got to do to get promoted. It's not just showing up for work. I have to achieve these milestones. I have to do these, deliver work in this way. It is a huge headache off the business owner's plate. And if you're in a corporate team and you're having you already have to do reviews anyway, you what's on
you.
is to really simplify the process is to remind your employees that this is so that we can reiterate a lot that you already know, make sure you feel super clear on the plan, what is next for you, where things are going, so that there's no surprises. Okay. So I hope this gives you some some context on how to structure review, some clarity. I do talk about this a lot in the New Manager playbook. And you can find that on my website at leagarva.com or on Amazon. And if you are thinking, okay,
I need, I want to figure this out. I there's some questions I still have, you know, or you have a performance review in your company that people are very stressed around, or you want to bring that owning your impact workshop to your team so that everybody writes the performance assessments in the right way, where it is not just bullet points about nothing, then reach out. liagarvin.com/contact We'll talk, figure out what the right solution is for you, and make sure that performance reviews are not stressful.
But are something that are used productively and can make people feel set up for success. See ya next time.
For your employees, one of the most dreaded, dreaded moments of the year, or twice a year, or quarterly, whatever frequency you do them at, are employee reviews. Like literally fill people with dread. They feel like, aah if I get this wrong, what does that mean for my career? Is it done for me? Do I do I cut off the future that I have been dreaming about? And I say that because if you are not taking seriously
How stressful employees can feel about reviews, then you're not gonna set them up right to demystify the process. And it's gonna be this whole thing that takes everyone's focus away from the work for like weeks at a time. And so today at Managing Made Simple, I'm gonna talk about how to demystify the employee review process and structure these conversations in a way that instead of being stressful, really allows you to come away with a plan that your team member is owning and they feel accountable to.
All right, let's do this.
Coming from working in big tech at Microsoft at Google, employee reviews were like the literal most stressful thing ever. And if you're in a corporate company, you might have experienced this too, where they are this major milestone where they, if they happen twice a year, you're building a
Anybody listening that works in a corporate team understands the perils of the employee review. I remember when I worked at Microsoft and at Google, the employee review would take people offline for weeks, trying to write the perfect self-assessment, trying to capture every little granular achievement in the right way so that they wouldn't feel like they like missed an opportunity to showcase what they did. Then managers would meet for weeks to calibrate people to make sure that they
really kind of vetted them against other people, and there'd be decisions made on promotions and and ratings and all sorts of things. This kind of system created so much stress, so much anxiety. And companies like Microsoft or Google, other places, they they constantly looked at like, how can we improve this process? Because it is so stressful. And I'm sure, you know, what whatever kind of company you're at, if it's a large one, the employer reprocess is this thing that creates a ton of dread.
Now, for you as a manager, why does it create all this dread? Because you're preparing these, you're writing your own assessments, you are you know, having to give feedback to someone that maybe doesn't want to hear it, all of these things. And if you're a business owner, maybe you haven't even thought about how to have an employee review. Maybe you haven't done it, maybe you've done them inconsistently, maybe you are just the same of not wanting to have a conversation with an employee and them kind of see, not see eye to eye on where things are netting out.
So employee reviews are so stressful because they're like the ultimate moment of feedback. And if it doesn't go right, it's like we had this one moment of giving the perfect feedback and the person didn't hear it, and now they're mad and now they might quit. Like, yuck. Okay. It's spiral central. Now, one thing I learned from working in a company like Google where the review would take people like they would be it would be all consuming for weeks. And actually, they did change the system before I left. So
You know, I don't really even know exactly how it is now, but there was a time when it would take like people would be focusing on it for weeks to get the perfect kind of everything written up in the perfect way. And in when I saw that at Google, what I did was I got really passionate about working with employees, working with my peers, I should say, and helping them write their self-assessments. So helping them own their impact, own their achievement, articulate their accomplishments in a way that wasn't
A laundry list of bullet points that nobody cared about, but really land the impact. Now, ironically, this became one of my signature keynotes, owning your impact, that I give all over the world for people to really feel like, hey, I'm gonna teach you a method for how to nail a performance for you by landing the why, not just the what, right? The impact, not just the effort. and so I do a lot on the employee side, but for you as the manager.
you have a lot that you can do too to make this experience like go well, not be so stressful. And in the New Manager playbook, I share a framework for performance reviews, which is just to simplify the whole thing. And even if you have a pretty rigorous, you know, like laborious, I should say, I think they're all pretty rigorous, but even if you have a laborious perceived to be laborious review process in your company, you can still demystify it.
By really, you know, reminding your employees that a review is about two things: looking backwards and looking ahead. And more so looking ahead at how can we set you up for whatever goals you have? How can we give you the feedback that you need so that you feel supported, so that you feel clear and you know the path you are going on. If you explain that to your employee, it starts to make it a little bit less stressful. Now,
Are they gonna believe you if the only time you ever gave feedback is during the review? And no, they are not, right? So there's some legwork leading up to this, which is having regular feedback conversations, having the sit-down. Remember, where you have a structured conversation, 30 minutes, where you take responsibility. Hey, I haven't stopped to sit down and meet with you, or we've been really busy and I want you to know that I'm aware of that. Step two, you give the specific feedback or recognition. Step three, come away with an action plan.
If you are having regular sit-down conversations and feedback conversations and making sure someone is really clear on where they stand and what needs to change or what they should keep doing to keep crushing it, then the performance review in and of itself is way less stressful. Okay, that's already like you have done 80% of the work because there's not going to be any surprises. But I've been there.
When I was managing folks in corporate, I felt like the review was still really stressful, even if I had been giving weekly feedback to my employees. So I'm not trying to say this is not a stressful thing for you as a manager. But what made it easier was that there was no surprises. Now, how be along with, hey, these are the goals we want to look back and look forward, like how do you structure the conversation? Well, I think the length of the meeting is really important. If you set aside an hour.
If you set aside more than that, it it makes someone feel like there's this like massive conversation where you have a laundry list of things to go through. You want to leave enough time for the conversation, but it doesn't have to be, you know, I think 30 to 45 minutes is is enough, right? You're looking through how did things go? Let's talk about the wins and let's talk about the things you've been working on. And then the next part is let's look ahead. What are some of the goals? What are some of the things that are on, you know, the key priorities?
And what are things that you want to keep developing in order to achieve those goals? Or if there was some stru struggles, like how are we going to keep making sure that you are improving on those areas? That, my friend, is the whole conversation. And when you structure it this way, now it's easy to pull these things into routine one-on-ones or check in, hey, like every quarter and just be touching base on it because it's very, very specific. This is what you set out to do. Here's some of the things that you're improving or areas that you're developing in.
We're on the same page. Now, if you are in a situation, I I I whether if you're building out your own performance review process, I do suggest that you create a self-assessment of sorts. One page, right? Not 17 pages, where an employee outlines their key projects that they focused on, like what were they doing over the last six to 12 months, whatever time cycles that you're using, you know, what were the big wins? Obviously, tying metrics to it is very helpful, right? What what did
they?
You know, what KPIs did they hit? you know, so summarizing the wins and then summarizing things, maybe one or two things that, hey, this didn't go as well, or something I learned, something that I'm working on, right? And having your employee practice both summarizing what they do concisely, making sure things are tied to a KPI or a metric that's important for the business and the team. And then
Being self-reflective, like, yeah, there is something that you could be working on. Everybody has something they could be working on. And so that's getting them into the rhythm of self-reflecting, continual improvement, learning from mistakes. And I think you can learn a lot about a team member, especially the longevity that they'll have in your team or in your business by what they put on the areas I'm developing or lessons learned. Because I will tell you.
Nine times out of 10, maybe that's too much, but like let's call it seven times out of ten, it's the low performers that write, everything went fine, I have nothing to learn. And it's the 10Xers and the star players, they're like, I messed this up, I messed this up. They're more self-critical because they are on a continual learning journey. And if you have someone that isn't very strong and they have no concept of it, and they have to take in no responsibility, or you've given them all this feedback, this happens to a lot of my clients.
You've given the feedback a bunch of times and they don't even mention it in the performance review. They're like, yeah, no, Effing's been great. Like to something to improve. I guess I could yeah, like I think people usually make up general, I could be prioritize my time better, like some like general bucket that like everybody could sort of do. If they're not willing to get specific there, you are getting a ton of insight on is this person maybe a long term fit?
Does this person need, you know, coaching on like how to think about their career goals? Is this person really invested? So this self-assessment piece, which is pretty commonplace in a large company, if you're thinking about how do I, you know, do a review process, I strongly encourage that. And and to show someone an example of it, maybe you write one up for yourself as an as a model, it should be one page. Because again, when I worked in big tech,
People would write like 50-page documents for their self-assessment for like a six month period of time. That's unnecessary. It's stressful. And it makes you, the manager, completely unclear on what they thought was important. So part of actually doing a good job of it is being concise, is being brief, is surfacing like the most salient things to show. Now, so that's that is the structure of the self-assessment, the conversation. You know, you'll go through.
what you know the past and and going forward. And now your feedback, it's gotta be just like best practices of feedback specific. Right. If there are things that you are you've already brought up, you've already mentioned, you already talked about, remind them of that. Hey, we had a couple conversations around deadlines and you know that's continued to be a bit of a challenge. Over the next six months, over the next year, whatever the cycle is, this is my expectation.
So you have a really fantastic opportunity in the performance review to reiterate things that you've already talked about, to re to align around wins. Hey, you have been showing up in a fantastic way in our client presentations. They've come to really rely on you as that sounding board, as that, you know, person they go to when they have questions in the next six to 12 months. My expectation is you keep really developing this as a skill.
And then in the future, potentially you're owning client relationships, right? So you're reinforcing what needs to change or what needs to continue. And then the last thing about the conversation is when there's action items, when there's things that someone should be taking forward, developing, you're asking them, okay, so what are you going to do? When should we come back together? What are you going to flop on? You're leaving the ball of the actions in their court.
That's how people take ownership over improving or keep doing something or whatever it is, is they own that follow-up. You're the manager, but you've delivered the feedback. If there's something that you said, I need to find you something for that, okay, cool. But in general, the conversation should be on them. They're owning, okay, I'm gonna look for a course or a training in this. I'm gonna find a conference, I'm gonna you know, kick off a project around that. They are owning the follow-ups, they're owning the actions.
Now, months ago, I was attending a like a a webinar collection of HR consultants and ops consultants, and it was about performance reviews. And when someone asked in this chat, do are performance reviews really necessary? Do you know what if I just don't want to do performance reviews in my company? Do we have do that? And a woman who was a HR
Manager at a startup. She came off mute and she said, I suggest that people don't do performance review until they absolutely have to. I always advise my clients, no performance reviews, do not do them. They're just a headache. They're just administrative. And my blood was boiling listening to this. I was outraged. And I didn't want to interrupt. There was like a hundred people on the call. I didn't want to like interrupt it and and, you know, embarrass this person or you know, cause a scene. I wrote in the chat.
I've found them to be very useful in in my case, working with hundreds of businesses, working, you know, in in all different fields. So I just like to offer another perspective. So I was very civil, my friends. But the reason my blood was boiling is because one of the number one reason people quit. So high turnover is your most expensive problem. It costs you between 50 to 200% of someone's salary to rehire them. It's a freaking nightmare, right? For you, for the rest of your team.
If you have to hire new people. One of the number one reasons people quit is because they feel undervalued, right? The great resignation, when you look at that data, why are people leaving? And a huge reason, especially senior women leave the workforce, is contributed to what they call a broken wrong in the ladder. They don't see how they can get to the next level. That is solved by having performance conversations. Like your biggest turnover headache is solved by having performance conversations.
And I don't care if you have one employee or 10,000. When someone comes to work and they are trying and they are doing a job, they want to know where they stand. They want to know where it's going for them. They want to know when, you know, how am I doing? When when is the promotion possible? When is a raise possible? Your employees, again, even if someone is working 10 hours a week at the front desk and most of the time they spend on their phone, that person
Kind of no wants to know, like, hey, is this is is there something here or not? And I'm I know I'm exaggerating with that one, but literally, your employees are hungry to know where they stand. And so to believe, I don't need to tell them where they stand because I don't want to deal with it. I don't I feel like it's an average. I feel like blah, blah, blah. That is about you. It has nothing to do with them. And so if you've made a simple process that's easy to follow, like, hey, here's a one-pager highlights.
Things you're improving, c goals for next time. We meet, you know, for 30 minutes. I give you some specific feedback. If you make it that simple and straightforward, then like literally you have no reason not to do it. It's not administrative headaches. It's creating documentation. If you have someone that's struggling and you need to have some documentation to make some decisions around, like there's literally no downside. And so, I was pretty de devastated. It's like really strong, but like I was like,
Outraged. I was upset that this person was advising other folks not to do something that your employees are hungry for, that they are asking for, that they want because you don't feel like doing it. And the other the other thing this woman said was, yeah, I don't, I don't implement any performance system until the employees are asking for it. It's like this is they are working in your company. You're you're like having them ask you for HR systems.
Like that's crazy. That's not your employees' responsibility to have to ask you for that. They should be in a company that has these like very s simple, like rhythm of business things that are already set up. Like they should get the regular paycheck when they've been told it would come. They should have if it requires email, like a working email address, right? A computer, if that's you know what I mean? Like performance review is like just general business hygiene. It's I see it to be a requirement.
And with my small business owner clients, even literally if they have two employees, we implement it and the employees are bettered for it and they're happy and they feel clear and they know, okay, this is what I've got to do to get promoted. It's not just showing up for work. I have to achieve these milestones. I have to do these, deliver work in this way. It is a huge headache off the business owner's plate. And if you're in a corporate team and you're having you already have to do reviews anyway, you what's on
you.
is to really simplify the process is to remind your employees that this is so that we can reiterate a lot that you already know, make sure you feel super clear on the plan, what is next for you, where things are going, so that there's no surprises. Okay. So I hope this gives you some some context on how to structure review, some clarity. I do talk about this a lot in the New Manager playbook. And you can find that on my website at leagarva.com or on Amazon. And if you are thinking, okay,
I need, I want to figure this out. I there's some questions I still have, you know, or you have a performance review in your company that people are very stressed around, or you want to bring that owning your impact workshop to your team so that everybody writes the performance assessments in the right way, where it is not just bullet points about nothing, then reach out. liagarvin.com/contact We'll talk, figure out what the right solution is for you, and make sure that performance reviews are not stressful.
But are something that are used productively and can make people feel set up for success. See ya next time.
