Year End Annual Reviews: How to avoid de-motivating your team while giving honest and useful feedback

By Tolami Franklin

You are a manager leading a team. You arrange 1:1 meetings with each member of your team to have that conversation, typically relegated to take place once a year – the annual performance review. Its very mention can prompt anxiety for many, a response which prior experience suggests is often real and warranted. Consequently, research proves that ratings have the ability to shift our brains into fear or flight mode, a shift that encourages defensiveness and eliminates the opportunity to learn.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Year End review process isn’t all shivers and shakes, it has its merits and it does serve a purpose.

The Year End process offers some organizational benefit as it provides a structure and context by which staff are measured and thus rewarded, providing a target for individuals to work towards which can have a motivational value. This value is even more evident when staff are truly bought in and have a shared understanding of the culture of the organization they are affiliated to. Weiss and Hartle in their book ‘Reengineering performance management’, describe the annual review as being built on the tenets of shared understanding as a means to increase the likelihood of achieving success at both an individual and organizational level. Similarly, in Armstrong’s Handbook of Performance Management, the annual review is defined within the context of an agreed framework of planned goals and requirements. Notably, the critical words underpinning the annual performance review are ‘agreed’ and ‘shared’, thus its philosophy is rooted on a mutuality of interest for employers and employees, all of which is good, at least in theory.

This marks the key ingredient in turning the culture of fear to a culture of opportunity.

But the bad can’t be ignored! There are more practical drawbacks which squash this theoretical understanding of the annual performance review. In a meta-analysis of performance evaluations, Kluger and Denisi in their publication ‘Feedback effectiveness: Can the 360-degree appraisal be improved?’ concluded that at least 30% of the performance reviews ended up in decreased employee performance and HR studies show that 90% of performance appraisals are painful and simply do not work.

Likewise, the ugly truth is that an employee could feel so disheartened by the annual performance review process that their confidence takes a severe hit and they choose to leave their team or worse the organization. This may mean that a team member who has shown promise by being employed in the first place is left paralyzed by an ineffective performance review, made worse by an ill-prepared manager.

So how can you get the benefits that year end reviews are supposed to render and eliminate the culture of fear associated with that conversation?

Play your role
A manager plays the starring role of the protagonist in the year end review, as they are to evaluate their team’s performance over the course of a year often on the basis of biased judgement. It can be a stressful time for managers and subordinates alike – who respectively have to make a judgement or have to be judged. A consequence of this being that a manager can delay the layers of process involved until the last minute and frame ratings on the recency of good or bad output and behaviour, rather than a holistic assessment of the full performance year. This can be detrimental to the collective success of an individual, team and even the organization.

Career conversations
Research shows that the statistical measurement and forced rating doesn’t lend itself to the collaborative nature of today’s corporate world. Managers and indeed subordinates have a personal and professional duty to ensure that the performance review is done in a way which reflects the dynamic environment they are situated. Therefore, having career conversations throughout the course of the year rather than strictly at the point of the annual performance review is in the best interest of all parties. A manager should know their team’s frustrations and career aspirations, because there is regular, transparent, two-way communication. Career conversations diffuse the responsibility of the protagonist role owned by the manager by giving each team member a platform to voice their assertions – achievements or setbacks. This empowers the employee to play a more proactive role in the build up to the annual performance review.

Continuous feedback
As a manager, regular coaching and feedback should be given to your team throughout the year so they consistently know where they stand and what is needed for improvement. Feedback can be provided at the end of a client meeting, presentation or points at which traits of positive or negative behaviour is demonstrated. It is particularly important to recognise the power of continuous feedback in eliminating the culture of fear around the annual performance review for both strong and weak performers in the team. Strong performers should be praised and challenged to continue to do better. And weaker performers should also be praised for their achievements but their development points should be addressed objectively – delivering negative feedback in third person helps!

The Year End annual review should not be seen in isolation – it simply marks the final milestone of a build-up of discussions taken place throughout the year. Understanding your role as a manager, engaging in open dialogue and providing objective feedback to your team while ensuring they buy into the shared goals of the wider organization are the key ingredients to eliminating the cold sweat brought on by that conversation.

It is possible to turn that culture of fear into a culture of opportunity!