What is yearly review management?

Review management is a term used by HR departments, but also applies to team managers.qui concerne également les managers d’équipes.

It is a management tool at the forefront of company performance. Management sets the course, managers align the company’s strategy at the individual level, employees express their training needs and the HR department supports the employees’ skills development. On paper, the process looks simple. The reality is more complex, however, given the stakes involved in talent management and the multitude of parties involved.

Best practices in review management

Dull, inefficient, time-consuming, tedious, stressful… annual interviews do not get good press, both from the HR department and from managers and employees.

The idea of simply eliminating yearly appraisals is tempting, but unfeasible. Indeed, companies can’t manage without evaluation or professional interviews, to justify promotions or to be able to identify the evolution of available skills within the company.

Why not simply change the methods to improve performance and make reviews more efficient?

Separate review topics

The annual review has become a catch-all subject: it covers last year’s objective reviews, the setting of objectives for the coming year, performance review, compensation, training wishes, etc. The HR reviews are too long to be prepared by the employee, difficult to conduct by the manager and complex to analyse by the HR department. By devoting the annual review to a single subject, you make it a real moment for dialogue and exchange. And in this case, the only topic to be discussed is the employee’s career development. For the other topics, it is best to address them throughout the year through regular feedback, quarterly objective reviews, etc.

Decentralizing the conduct of individual reviews

If the HR department coordinates campaigns, employees and their managers are in charge of their content. The person who should speak most in an appraisal review is not the manager, but the employee. In order to make the review time useful, it is essential to prepare the meeting so that the discussion is focused on the substance of the topics. To go further, there are methods such as self-assessment or the individual goal-setting process that allow employees to become active players in their progress within the company.

When assessing the annual performance of employees, the way in which team objectives are set – whether they are project-specific, bi-annual or quarterly – is of great importance. At Lucca, the company has gradually moved to quarterly objectives based on the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method. Management provides the company’s strategic roadmap. The managers and their teams decide together on the objectives that will follow this course and indicate in practical terms how they will be achieved and what percentage of achievement corresponds to each of the stages. This process sets objectives that are both achievable and measurable, which facilitates the preparation and conduct of annual reviews and allows each employee to feel responsible for achieving collective objectives.

Peer evaluation is also an excellent way to assess the employee’s performance within a team. This type of evaluation involves the people who work with the same employee: his or her superiors, colleagues, direct team members, etc. This method makes it possible to carry out a more detailed analysis of the profile of the appraisee and to complete the manager’s point of view.

Streamline the review management process

Getting their hands on previous years’ reviews, designing or changing the evaluation grid, launching the campaign, monitoring the review process, analysing the reports, etc. HR managers spend more time managing and consolidating the results of campaigns than acting on what they learn from them.

By streamlining your methods, you create better conditions for a higher quality of reviews. Changing your procedures, automating tasks with no added value, decentralising the management of reviews… all of these are ways of giving your teams the means to focus on the things that are important for achieving your company’s objectives.

Automating the management of annual reviews: key features

The market for goal & review management software is full of solutions with varying degrees of sophistication. To help you choose, here are five things you should look for in such a solution.

A paperless form

As with time tracking, or the onboarding and offboarding processes, conducting interviews in Word or Excel format presents serious limitations in terms of usage, whether on the user or HR side. Review management software will not improve the content of your reviews, but rather free your teams from the logistical burden of administrative management of campaigns, provided that the interface is designed for the end user.

Duplicating review campaigns

Why limit yourself to one yearly appraisal when you could multiply the opportunities to gather feedback, to ensure that your employees are satisfied with their missions, return to work from sick in the best conditions and meet their objectives? To launch your campaigns, all you need is 3 simple steps: choice of the form, selection of the population, and deadlines.

A clear view on the progress of the reviews

The majority of review campaigns last 1 to 2 months. Without a global view of their progress, it is difficult to take action at the right time and with the right person, to quickly deal with the topics at risk or to identify the reviews that haven’t been submitted even though they are overdue. Accurately monitoring the status of reviews: not completed, in progress, completed, waiting for approval, caveats, etc. is the key to successful campaigns.

Centralization and archiving of review reports

In order to effectively prepare a review, the employee and his/her manager must have access to the reports from previous years. In addition to the comfort of not having to search through their computer or, in the worst case, their filing cabinet, review archiving can be necessary for those countries where reviews are mandatory by law, to prove that they were held in the event of an inspection, for example, for a performance-related review.

Usable data

In order to prepare your training plan, identify high performers or adjust compensation, you need to easily reprocess the collected information. With a dynamic pivot table, you can select the items that you wish to compare and calculate, for example, the average evolution of the employee satisfaction rate in relation to their assignments (from one year to the next or by quarter).