True to the Agile spirit, just as we continuously provide feedback on our products to continuously improve them, we should also conduct continuous performance reviews. Check-ins are a great way to solicit feedback from our team members as it provides a platform for them to chart their own progression and achievements over the course of their career. It also serves as a plan for their personal growth.
Annual Performance Review Pitfalls
As our product requirements and needs may change over time, an employee’s motivation and growing needs may change as well. Regular check-ins allows us to quickly adapt to changes instead of waiting for a performance review. This lets us rapidly course correct if our approach or plan does not meet our initial set goals.
Often times a Performance Review session feels like an interrogation process between an employee and a manager where an employee needs to justify their performance for a better compensation. Check-ins gives us the opportunity engage more closely with our employees and work together with them instead of against them. This helps foster better transparency when it comes to compensation discussions.
Format
A good check-in process provides a simple, frictionless and open communication between an employee and their managers. To encourage employees to regularly check in, we propose a simple and painless form with 2 questions:
1. What have they achieved or learned ?
2. What do they think can be improved ?
The first question probes and challenges an employee to constantly seek new goals or learning opportunities that they can achieve. Should they are unable to think of any goals to set, then a manager may need to step in to provide guidance. Examples of entries may include their recent accomplishment or a new technical skill learnt. They may also choose to update the status of any long term goals or projects that will set them up to a path of success and achieve their career objectives.
The second question serves two purposes. First, it checks if an employee is empowered to carry out their tasks effectively. It also identifies any blockers that are not immediately obvious. Second it allows them to propose process improvements across the team. Think of this as a mini retrospective.
Frequency
The frequency of these check-ins will depend on the team and the complexity of the tasks for a few reasons. Frequent check-ins may exhaust everyone in the process quickly. However infrequent check-ins will result in the same performance review pitfall too. Managers need to be observant and encourage these check-ins as necessary and employees should feel empowered to initiate check-ins whenever they are comfortable.
Conclusion
Regular check-ins are a great way to keep your team engaged and to identify team issues early. Continuously reviewing an employees goal and motivation lets them monitor their progress and visualize how close they are in achieving their goals.
What Is Continuous Performance Management?
https://www.clearreview.com/resources/guides/continuous-performance-management/
Read about other good delivery and engineering practices
https://www.kianyang.co/to-hotfix-or-not-to-hotfix/