Why your employee reviews should be values based

If you have read our blog for a while you will know that we hold the annual employee review with great distain, for many reasons it's in effective and does neither side of the equation any real benefit.

When it comes time to sit down with the boss to do an employee review session what invariably happens is that, as an employee, you quickly dig out that list of objectives or targets you got for the year. Then you set about trying to prove you are hitting them or at least on track to hit them. If you aren't going to hit them then it's time to come up with a really good justification on why they will make a whooshing noise as their due date dissapears into the rear view mirror.

As a leader you prepare by reviewing the targets you set for the employee, the last review that you did with them and if you are really good, collect some feedback from others about how the employee is to work with.

Both sides of the discussion come fully prepared to talk about and possibly even argue about the merits of these targets and their achievement. At the end of the discussion both sides leave the session with hopefully some understanding of where each other believes they are at (irrespective of them agreeing with it) and then carry on pretty much as they did before.

Clearly a worth while use of everyone's time and energy.

What about Values? 

As an organisation or a leader, think for a minute about when you hired this employee. Did you benchmark them against a set of targets you already had or just perhaps tick off a list of capabilities the person had that you needed? Sadly, more than a few organisations do pretty much exactly this or a variation of this or just compare the potential new employee against the employee who is leaving.

Some (but nowhere near enough) however do actually talk about company values in interviews, what they are and why they are important, and that the employee needs to fit into these values to actually work for the organisation. They do this because if someone is going to fit into your company and be successful then they need to fit in with your company culture, that culture of course is based on your values (right!?).

My question then is this, if we say that we hire for values or 'fit' then why don't we fire for that, and why isn't that part of the employee review process? 

Valuing the review 

Imagine that you sat down with your employee and had a bit of a chat about how they are going with their 2 or 3 objectives (yep, I said 2 or 3 not 7 or 8 or 12!) and that took up no more than 10-15 minutes. Then you spent the rest of your planned 40 mins to an hour and talked about culture and company values and how they fit into it? What if you were able to point to a company value and then talk to the employee about real examples of where they have either demonstrated the value or not met the value?

What would that do for the employee? For the organisation? Wouldn't it send a fairly loud message that you genuinely care about your organisational values? That you expect your employees to work inline with those values?

Now think about the ripple effect that 1 conversation can have on the organisation. If as a leader, you go out and ask 5 people about Bob and how he demonstrates the values and ask for examples then what will those 5 people think? By the way when I talk about asking I mean face to face, not via email, you need to be able to see their genuine reaction when you ask them.

Imagine those 5 people plus your employee in the canteen talking to their colleagues "Hey, Bob's boss was asking about him meeting our company values today" Now you have 5 people talking to another 5 or 10 who may talk to some more. What if every manager had the same conversations? What would that say about values?

Weighted Value 

What if we took this a step further and said that a minimum of 60% of the scoring from an employee review is based on your company values, what would that do? What impact would that have on the high performing jerk that meets all their targets but tramples on or bullies everyone to do it? In our normal situation this jerk gets rewarded, so the behaviour is reinforced and so continues. 

If you flipped it around and said Ok you hit the targets, but you were a jerk when you did it, so you get zero for values, now they have failed to achieve what you needed. Do they get to keep doing this or do you start to weed these people out?

If values are genuinely important to you as an organisation, make them genuinely matter. Make them the major part of every review you have with your team. 

The Right Value 

Now the pushback we get at this point of the discussion is typically, " well we just won't meet our targets then if we put weight on them rather than the targets".

My last few questions then for you to ponder on this situation: 

If you worry that focusing on the values over the target will have a negative effect, have you got the right values and are your company objectives aligned to your values? 

If not, perhaps it time for a bit of introspection and some change.