Performance reviews often get a bad rap. Employees find them emotionally draining and unmotivating. Managers dread grinding out the hours to fill out forms, hoping not to trigger a fight or flight response. HR professionals dust off all the tools and techniques to outdo last year’s completion percentage. As much anxiety as it produces, employees still want to know how they performed and where they stand in the organization. Performance reviews guide essential talent management activities, including compensation and promotion decisions, recognizing top performers, and prioritizing development activities.

A performance review is a single event. Managing performance is an ongoing employee experience—where feedback and guidance are rooted in your day-to-day activities. Modifying your approach and improving the experience help take the heat off performance reviews and elevate employee satisfaction.

Consider the following three ways to enhance your performance review experience.

1. Check-in conversations: the more, the better 

For some, it could be weeks or even months before a manager provides feedback, praises results, or adjust expectations. Just as troubling, employees expressing concerns or needs is few and far between.

Having more meaningful check-in conversations helps build a stronger, more resilient employee-manager relationship. Regularly scheduled talks allow a manager and employee to connect on topics impacting performance—How are you doing? How can I better support you? What is working well? What is not working well? How can I help with your development goals? By maintaining a performance notebook during the year, managers save time composing year-end reviews, minimize recency bias, and improve performance conversations.

Oracle Touchpoints*, part of the Oracle ME employee experience platform, is built to help managers strengthen their relationships with their employees by enabling them to continuously capture, track, and act on employee sentiment. With Oracle Touchpoints, employees are empowered to play an active role in getting the support they need, and managers can confidently build trust by regularly connecting needs with actions in real-time.

2. Use additional guidance to drive fairness 

Research shows that employees believe performance management is effective when it’s perceived as being fair. Guiding employees to prepare, complete, and deliver performance reviews drives consistency and sets the foundation for fairness. Ideally, the guidance is tailored to each employee and filled with training and insights to help employees make the best evaluations. An effective guide may include:

  • Steps to gather feedback from others.

  • A training video on how to prevent performance review bias.

  • A report of past performance reviews.

  • Best practices for productive coaching conversations.

The guidance saves time, promotes fairness, and reduces anxiety from completing an unpopular process.

Oracle Journeys makes it easy for employees to find and complete personalized, step-by-step workflows to guide them through professional and personal activities, such as performance reviews, new hire onboarding, exploring career opportunities, and getting married. Drawing from one source of people data, you can direct employees to the right journeys based on the individual’s unique needs in context to the action being performed, making informed decisions easier and raising your employee experience to another level.

3. Promote the experience

Effective internal communication campaigns can help shift perceptions about performance reviews from a time-consuming, awkward process to an engaging employee experience. Messages encouraging frequent check-in conversations, posting leadership videos on the organization’s commitment to fairness, and sharing tips from department managers on delivering constructive feedback are all examples of effective communications that can build trust and confidence.

Many HR teams must rely on corporate communications or use third-party tools to quickly reach employees through digital channels, adding complexity, time, and risk. Oracle HCM Communicate is a contact solution built directly into Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM and designed for HR, giving you control of the audience, content, and timing of every message without depending on other teams. You can also track and measure how engaged people are with your communications and send targeted follow-up messages for maximum effect.

Conduct effective performance reviews with your workforce

Performance reviews are not perfect, but they remain valuable to your talent management strategy. By redirecting the process to an engaging experience, employees will see the good intentions, be more accepting of undesirable outcomes, and adopt a growth mindset.  

Want to learn more? Explore Oracle ME, the only complete employee experience platform that empowers talent to connect, grow, and thrive.

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*Disclaimer: The preceding is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products may change and remains at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation.