Employee evaluations have always been a pet peeve of mine. I hate giving them, I hate getting them (part of the reason I started Ascendant was so that I would no longer have to get an annual review), and I find them to have little to no value. They're either used to document behavior that's well understood or to create a paper trail to eventually terminate someone. And everyone is above average. So what's the point?

Well, at Ascendant we've grown to the point where we need to put in place things like annual reviews. And, like everything else we're doing here, we're trying to figure out a way to do it where it isn't just a waste of time. Where it can provide real value to both the employee and the manager. Where the time invested in doing the review pays dividends.

Now, I'm not going to say that we've found the holy grail of reviews, but for us, a big a-ha was that we needed to do two things in order to improve this process:

1) Look a leading indicators, not lagging indicators. Duh, right? We should be looking at what the employee could do, not what they did do. Yes, they filed all of their TPS reports on time. But that's table stakes. If they're not doing what they were hired to do, they shouldn't be working here. It's that simple. But what are they doing above and beyond? At the next grade or higher? If they're a new Associate, are they doing Consultant work? Are Consultants doing Manger work? Etc.

2) Building on #1, make the process a forward looking one, not a backward looking one. Yes, everyone does "development plans" as an annex to their performance reviews, but that's where the meat of the conversation should happen. Talk about the goals for the next year -- be they promotion, different work, areas that need growth, etc. Come to agreement about what excellence looks like, and how to get to it. And then (back to #1) put in place measures that evaluate it.

Finally, we realized that performance reviews are not just a point-in-time concept, but need to be part of an ongoing dialog about performance. Just like you need to look at your strategy and scorecard more than once a year, you need to look at your employee performance more than once a year. The cadence of these conversations will depend on the job and company, but trust me, once a year is too infrequent.

So, while I'm not yet a convert to employee evaluations, I'm starting to come around. Your thoughts?

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