Organizations go through the employee review or performance review process at different times during the year. Some organizations tie the performance review to the anniversary date of the employee, while others tie it to either the calendar year or fiscal year of the organization. No matter when you do employee reviews one thing seems to be commonplace, most people don’t enjoy the review process.
Experts agree on one thing when it comes to employee reviews. Employee reviews should never be a surprise to the employee. If your organization does a formal review process, employees should not learn things in the review process for the first time. As a manager it is our job to make sure that employees have feedback on their performance in a timely manner that allows employees to correct prior to the formal review process. According to SHRM one common perfomance rating error is the Recency effect. When managers are not diligent in continuously measuring performance, providing feedback and documenting results, they often cannot remeber the earlier part of the performance period. As a result, they weigh the most recent events too heavily. We must get to a point where managers and employees are engaged in continuous feedback. Hence the trend for continuous feedback that has been taken place over the last decade according to an article published by SHRM in 2019 (Levit, Feb 2019), and is now considered common practice.
Starting with the General availability of PeopleSoft 9.2 we released checkpoints with PeopleSoft Performance Management (ePerformance). Since that time, we have had feedback that checkpoints have become a way of life for many organizations, and they need more functionality to ensure they are tracking the data elements of the checkpoint in a way that is conducive to the conversation. We will be releasing a new modern and fluid performance document as part of Performance Management. With the new performance documents comes enhancements to checkpoints to allow more data elements to be tracked during the year. Managers and employees will have the ability to track percentage complete on goals as well as update target completion dates. Managers will also be able to rate competencies and goals to allow for clear feedback when discussing accomplishments during the year.
Ultimately, the goal is that the review process becomes seamless and transparent. Allowing for employees and managers to document the conversation throughout the year means there are no surprises at the end of the year. The new functionality will be coming as part of an overall modernization of PeopleSoft’s Performance Management scheduled for release in 2023.
SHRM. (2019). Managing Employee Performance. SHRM. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/toolkits/pages/managingemployeeperformance.aspx
Levit, A., & Levit, A. (2019, February 4). Viewpoint: How to Collect Continuous Feedback. SHRM. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/employee-relations/pages/viewpoint-how-to-collect-continuous-feedback.aspx