Re-appraising our performance

Many of us will have been in a job once where we had a less-than-ideal experience of the annual employee appraisal.

What companies call this tête-à-tête varies, but all too often in the past it has been a box-ticking exercise. Your line manager is obviously hurried and harried, with a dozen more appraisals to do that should have been completed last week, and (it seemed) more important things to be doing. You didn’t know quite what to expect from the meeting. The questions and discussion – if any – were somewhat perfunctory. Assessment and feedback on your performance was vague. Afterwards, you were not much wiser, with perhaps just a place on some training course sometime in the future to look forward to.

Performance reviews – as they now tend to be styled – are just one small part of how we manage people performance. I believe they are a valuable tool when properly designed and managed, though even then they have their detractors. Some HR professionals – not to mention managers and employees – criticise them as being too infrequent, too bureaucratic, or feel the assessment of performance isn’t rigorous or objective.

Imperfect as they may be, performance reviews still have a useful role to play in people performance management and development. The context is crucial. At their most effective, reviews take place within a holistic approach and company culture that encompasses a shared vision and values, clear team and personal objectives, genuine respect for individuals and care for their wellbeing, and commitment to training and development.

At SUEZ every employee is invited to an annual performance review and, over recent years, we have been refining the process in the light of feedback from managers and employees.

While the main reviews are yearly, they are supplemented by midterm reviews, which give the manager and their team member quality time to update each other on progress, changes in priorities, perceived benefits or shortcomings of training undertaken, and other issues often related to team dynamics or new operational challenges.

Previous posts ?have described our Wellness for All charter and the extensive wellbeing programme we’ve rolled out over the last three years. We know that the topic of wellbeing – whether it’s work/life balance or aspects of mental health – has arisen naturally in annual review conversations. From this year, we decided to make it part of the formal agenda. An individual’s wellbeing almost invariably affects their performance, and the reverse is often true too. Broaching the potentially sensitive subject within the review session also provides another opportunity for colleagues who have previously not felt able to discuss their concerns for whatever reason, despite our best efforts to encourage and support them.

Performance reviews have always helped us identify the training and development needs and aspirations of our employees and match them to suitable learning opportunities. Last year they generated 1,820 new learning and development requests. Of these, 1,450 were already available through our current training offer. The additional 370 requests required new training interventions across 10 themes. Now part of our extensive 2022 L&D catalogue, these included a digital course developed in-house on modern day slavery.

Increasingly, we have also been able to identify talent through our performance reviews, helping us develop a new generation of team leaders and managers, and improve our succession planning. The secondment of employees to different parts of the business is an effective way of supporting that career development. Many of our secondees owe their opportunities to discussions about their future roles and aims that were prompted by annual or midterm reviews.

The mentoring programme?we launched this year is something new to talk about. To be effective – not least as a means of improving people’s performance across the business – we need to recruit mentors at all levels of the organisation. While mentors need to have the appropriate experience and competence, mentees too must be committed, have potential and a specific development need. Again, performance reviews and our annual talent cycle are going to play an important supporting role in identifying colleagues who stand to benefit from mentoring, if not in the matching process.

Hence my firm view that these reviews can contribute to effective performance and talent development.

Such are the challenges in managing people performance, I can only welcome the recent guidance issued by the CIPD which myself and other senior HR professionals contributed to. As its evidence review notes, improving people performance is a central issue for HR professionals and managers. We need to follow best practice, not only to guide our own decision-making, but also to make the business case for investing in people.

As the world of work has changed, it has become harder to even define what constitutes performance, let alone measure and track it at either team or individual level. In a diversified business – with activities ranging from refuse collection through recycling operations to materials trading, waste fuel manufacturing and electricity generation – the challenge can seem even more complex.

The main definitions of people performance – in terms of tasks included in a job description, contextual activities that benefit the wider organisation, and adaptive performance in changing circumstances – are helpful up to a point.

However, when we measure performance, we need to use the data as best we can to set meaningful objectives for our employees that motivate them, to hold them and their managers to account, and to inform decisions on pay and promotions. We do this by having identified eight critical success factors for our business, ranging from safety and wellbeing to social value, customer loyalty and profit. Progress against these benchmarks affects the annual bonuses earned by graded staff.

Data on people’s performance also informs decisions about our learning and development programme and the resources we invest in training.

The CIPD is right to advocate use of more than one people performance management model. We need to maintain our focus both on individuals – and the physical and psychological factors that enable them to perform – and how people work together in teams.

Such are the challenging in understanding and managing how people perform in a rapidly changing workplace, we must continuously re-appraise both performance and its management.