The 3 Pillars of Writing Genuinely Useful Feedback and Performance Reviews

Do performance reviews work? Gallup argues that they often don’t. According to Gallup’s research, “Only 14% of employees strongly agree their performance reviews inspire them to improve.” Worse, feedback and performance reviews can be so bad they can make performance worse one-third of the time.

What’s going on here? Gallup argues traditional, old-school approaches to employee reviews and feedback suffer from multi-level failures. They tend to be organized poorly, occur too infrequently to be useful, focus on the wrong things, create perverse incentives, and more. But it’s a single failing that we want to talk about today: the ways in which most performance reviews and feedback fail to just plain communicate.

Most performance reviews don’t convey critical information in a way that’s understandable, usable, and helpful for employees.

So, what can you do to ensure performance reviews lead to desired outcomes? Adhere to the 3 pillars of good communication.

1. Clarity: employees should walk away enlightened, not confused.

The recipient of the feedback or performance review should be able to digest and absorb the information quickly, easily, and completely. Follow the “keep it simple, silly” (KISS) strategy when formulating input for employees. That means using precise, simple language to avoid misunderstandings and overcomplication.

Avoid cliches, jargon, and abstractions, such as scores that try to compress a lot of meaning into a single number or word. In fact, The Harvard Business Review reports that employees tend to hate numerical scores; one study found that employees would literally rather be called “average” than rated a 3 on a 5-point scale.

2.?Specificity: employees should know exactly what’s working, what needs more work, and where to go from here.

A lack of specificity leaves the author’s intent open to interpretation, which creates uncertainty and risk. You might not achieve your desired outcome if your communication is imprecise. Even a loosely specific statement such as “complete five tasks a day instead of four” may not be clear enough to drive improved performance if the reviewee doesn’t know what tasks to complete or how to do so. ?

3. Tonality: employees should feel valued and heard, not demeaned, dismissed, or degraded.

The overall tone of the feedback can also dramatically impact how it’s absorbed and how it affects your relationship with the employee. “Tone is notoriously difficult to convey in writing. That’s why lexical precision is of utmost importance,” advises Hurley Write Executive Trainer Jennifer Torkelson , PhD. Jennifer and other pros from our team share their tips to communicate the right tone on a recent episode of Hurley Write TV.

Whether the tone is casual or formal, inquisitive or declaratory, or accusatory or collaborative can affect whether that worker actively engages with the feedback. In general, the appropriate tone depends on context and circumstances.

What other communication skills have helped you to lead effective performance reviews? Please share in the comments!