How Often Should You Give Performance Reviews

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How Often Should You Give Performance Reviews?
As HR and business professionals, we’ve heard time and time again that employees want feedback. They want to know how they’re doing, how they can improve, and how they can get ahead. Remember, there’s a difference between feedback and performance reviews. When it comes to feedback alone, it should be given every time an employee needs it or requires more direction. Performance reviews encompass an employee’s overall work style, improvements, and areas that require improvement. Knowing this, how often should you be giving performance reviews? Here are some different time frames for performance reviews, and how you could use them:

Monthly One-on-One Performance Reviews
Sometimes, it’s good to have a performance review that can address a longer range of work performance, and frequent enough to measure improvement as they go. So a monthly one-on-one is a great time frame. One-on-one’s are especially great for assessing how an employee is feeling. Has the past month been especially stressful? Have they spoken up enough? Ask for feedback? Did they feel they could have done better? Addressing these topics on a monthly basis is great, as it’s frequent enough to catch issues that may otherwise grow larger over time.

Quarterly Performance Reviews
Often, quarterly performance reviews emphasize the scope of work, or different projects that your employees are working on. These commonly work well for team reviews as well. Again, addressing individual employees should be more frequent. Quarterly reviews are great for breaking down projects - what was successful, what wasn’t, what goals were met, what goals weren’t met. How can your team as a whole improve? How differently can they approach the next project or goal? Each quarter feels like a fresh start for new assignments and projects. Use quarterly reviews to reflect that, and recharge your team!

Annual Performance Reviews
By now, your communication should be good enough where your employee would know what you’ll be discussing in year’s performance review. This isn’t merely a “how am I doing?” or “what are your goals for the team project?” review. Especially if you’ve had an employee for at least a year, this is the time to assess their work goals, and career goals. How satisfied are they with their performance? Do they want to remain where they’re at, or pursue some sort of promotion? Are there opportunities to move up in the company, or are they looking towards other career options? Around the one year mark, you could expect an employee to at least be thinking about ways to move up at your company. Expect to answer these questions. Assess whether your company can and wants to provide growth opportunities for the employee.


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