Milly Gladstone shares how scheduling early check-ins, setting clear goals, and making feedback a routine part of team culture drive continuous improvement.
Scheduling is an art. Cultivating the perfect schedule is a fine dance between planning ahead to ensure productivity and performance but leaving enough wiggle room so that plans can flex when a project (inevitably) doesn’t quite go to plan or that meeting has to shift.
It’s a natural part of working life; we schedule meetings and catch-ups, and we schedule projects — so why can’t most of us schedule our performance management well?
An article from the Learning Guild reveals:
“In many organisations, the closest employees get to performance management is an annual performance review. But that’s often too little, too late.”
Each year is started with the best intentions; to make more time for our growth and development. And yet, often, these intentions fall off faster than our New Year’s resolutions. As work picks up and the team gets busy, it is the internal, ‘non-urgent’ performance development that bears the brunt of our calendar rescheduling.
So, how can we schedule our performance management more effectively?
Get It In the Diary
Schedule events in bulk at the beginning of the year. If a check-in with a manager is meant to happen every month, schedule that time in each month for the whole year. Of course, this can change if absolutely necessary in the future (we aren’t fortune tellers, after all) but getting the time in the calendar upfront is half the battle.
Set Goals
Scheduling time for development is crucial, yes, but there should be the right intention and the right motivation behind it. This means some careful crafting of relevant, achievable, and exciting KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Setting these goals with timelines keeps the focus on development, even in busy seasons.
Build Performance into Culture
Scheduling performance reviews allows managers and employees alike to set aside that space to reflect and give feedback with structure. This, of course, shouldn’t be the only time that this type of conversation happens. Feedback is a gift that should be given frequently and near the time when the behaviour in question was performed. Don’t wait for the annual performance review to dump feedback on employees. Chances are they won’t remember the incident and the behaviour won’t change.
That last point has happened to me personally. In a prior role, a manager saved up all the feedback they had for me in an itemised spreadsheet and shared it all in one go. Not only did I fail to remember over half of the events my manager was talking about, but I was confused as to why this feedback hadn’t been given to me earlier. Waiting for one meeting a year to receive feedback only dilutes it; plus, it means there are probably a load of chances for improved performance that have been missed. Even in jobs where no day is the same, there is a core rhythm and routine that tasks will follow. If feedback is not given in a timely manner, it’s likely that the undesirable behaviour will be repeated over and over.
Building feedback into a team habit can help improve performance. Building a habit can be broken down into a loop of Cue, Routine, and Reward:
- Cue = A time, place, or feeling that initiates the habit.
- Routine = The action you take.
- Reward = The outcome of your action.
In our situation, this could equate to:
- Cue = Make a mental note of the behaviour that would benefit from changing.
- Routine = Bring up that behaviour in the next 1:1.
- Reward = Track progress in the next 1:1.
What we should be aiming for:
- Cue = Behaviour that would benefit from changing.
- Routine = Giving feedback on that behaviour and how it needs to change.
- Reward = Checking in during formal meetings to see how the behaviour has changed, and rewarding with a team-wide shout-out.
Feedback can feel difficult to give, so using a simple model that the whole team can buy into will help the habit form, and eliminate any fear or uncertainty that can come up when feedback needs to be given. Try WWW and EBI (a simple framework to share ‘What Went Well’ and that,
next time, it would be ‘Even Better If…’).