3 tips to save time in your upcoming round of reviews

Stefan Op de Woerd
Stefan Op de Woerd

It’s that time of year, with performance reviews looming on the horizon. What’s not so good is that in many organisations this is still seen as a time-consuming ‘must-do’ defined primarily by procedures and paperwork. But, fortunately there are a few quick and easy things you can do now to speed up the process and make performance reviews more effective. These 3 tips will really save you time.

Tip #1 Digitise performance reviews

Are you still working with forms in Word, with lots of toing and froing of documents by e-mail? These days, there’s really no longer any need to do it that way :-). Indeed, you can remedy this very easily. In less than a week, you can have a support tool – pre-filled with your data – on stream to make your performance review cycle completely digital.

The benefit for you is that employees and managers are automatically steered through the process and HR has real-time insight into employees’ progress. In other words, you have greater transparency and there is less risk of error.

Tip #2 Make forms easier

You are probably only too familiar with those off-putting performance review forms that are a complete bind to fill in… But, why do it the hard way when there’s an easier way? There are three ways to make your review form easier to use:

  1. Make it shorter
    Focus on the questions that really matter when it comes to performance. This will mostly be about achieving goals and the employee’s personal development.
  2. Pre-filled
    Make sure all information that is already known is pre-filled in the form. So, this could be goals agreed on at the beginning of the year.
  3. Provide context
    Provide as much context as possible that is relevant to answering the questions. This might include observations from the performance review, feedback received and evidence of competencies in practice.

With the right software, this will all be done automatically. That way, you save a lot of time spent on preparation and the form becomes much easier to fill in.

Save time in your upcoming round of reviews?

Explore our platform for free and discover how easy performance management can be

Tip #3 Get employees to provide their own input

It’s fairly safe to assume that the managers in your organisation will not be relishing the prospect of the latest round of performance reviews. They will be out of action for days or even weeks writing up a fair and honest review for everyone and then discussing it.

Perhaps this is the right moment to take some of that work off your managers’ shoulders and turn the process on its head. Why not let your employees write up their own performance review? All your managers will have to do then is give feedback on the review and potentially add to it themselves. This will save a massive amount of time!

You may have concerns about whether your employees are capable of evaluating their performance fairly, and that’s quite understandable. However, it has been shown time and again that when you trust your employees and give them responsibility, they nearly always handle it well. What if you’re of the school “trust is good, but control is better”? No problem! The manager has the last word, and takes the final decision.

Keeping it simple is the ultimate factor for success

The golden rule if you want to save yourself time is: make it simpler.

The reason IT came into being in the first place was to take work off people’s hands by automating processes. It is striking that the user is completely lost from sight in many HR systems. At the same time, it is ease of use for the employee that will ultimately determine its success.

To this end, the Dialog online platform starts with the employee and manager, doing everything possible to make it straightforward from their point of view To and so that users truly experience a simpler process and tangible savings in time. So, Dialog lets you put our 3 time-saving tips into practice straightaway.

Save time in your upcoming round of reviews?

Explore our platform for free and discover how easy performance management can be

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Convinced? Or nearly convinced? Try Dialog for free now. See for yourself how it can make the performance review cycle in your organisation much simpler.

Jochem Aubel and Stefan Op de Woerd are the founders of Dialog, surprisingly simple software for an effective performance management cycle. Want to know more about how Dialog supports employees and managers to achieve this? Take the product tour.

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