Performance review: Pleasure or nightmare?

Q: Job interviews produce a lot of anxiety and stress. But there's another stressful career-related meeting that doesn't get the attention it deserves: the employee performance review. Did your boss make your review a pleasure or a nightmare?

Nick's reply: Sorry if this seems like a loaded question, where I expect you to complain about your performance review. If your review was a well-thought out meeting that provided you with useful feedback and suggestions, then you have a good boss. But if you weren't so happy about your review experience, then you may find this discussion helpful.

Performance reviews have unfortunately become so routine that in many companies they're not very useful to the employee. In some cases, a company's human resources department manages the review process so closely that managers find it difficult to have truly useful discussions with employees about their work. In other situations, managers just don't want to be bothered. In some of the worst cases I've seen, managers tell employees to write their own reviews -- there's little contribution from the manager at all.

I think the main problem with performance reviews is that they are regarded as events fixed in time -- they happen just once at year, on a certain date. But in a good manager-employee relationship, the performance review is going on all the time. There's continuous useful feedback about the work, the employee's performance and the manager's involvement in the work. It's an open-door review policy, where the manager and the employee informally discuss how the job is going almost every day.

Ultimately, reviews are used to decide whether to promote, demote or fire employees. Nonetheless, companies make enormous mistakes with their employees, and they often keep the worst workers and lose the best. I believe such errors happen because many employers fail to have an honest, ongoing dialogue with workers about "how it's going." We all recognize that feedback is important, but we easily forget that regular, frequent feedback is usually best. It's worth asking: Why is it necessary to have performance reviews on a particular schedule, rather than as an integral part of the workday?

Companies aren't just going to up and change their formal review policies. But workers can change the way they are reviewed by helping their bosses review them daily, weekly and monthly.

How can you do that? Map your job responsibilities to your daily activity and make sure your boss knows how it all fits. For example, provide your boss with an informal report every week, listing the tasks your job required you to complete, then show (briefly) what you did, what tools you used, and the outcome of your efforts. Ask for a regular mini-review of your performance.

Or ask your boss for a list of key challenges she expects you to tackle over the next month. Then break these down yourself into manageable, easily defined tasks. At the end of each week, provide your boss with a progress report, and ask for feedback and suggestions about how you could do the job better.

The more you manage your boss's knowledge of your performance, the better your performance reviews will be -- both in terms of your "score" and in terms of the quality of the experience.

Copyright 2008. Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate

Nick Corcodilos is author of "Ask The Headhunter: Reinventing the Interview to Win the Job" and the host of www.asktheheadhunter.com. He can be reached by e-mail at seattle@asktheheadhunter.com or at North Bridge Group, P.O. Box 600, Lebanon, NJ 08833. Sorry, no personal replies.