Communications Specialist for Insperity Recruiting Services, specializing in employment branding and recruitment marketing.
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It’s hard to believe another year is nearly over, which means many employees will soon be preparing for their annual performance review. For employers, these reviews can be an invaluable tool to measure employee goal achievement over the past year, while planning for the next. Likewise, for employees, performance reviews provide an opportunity to document a year’s worth of hard work, then meet with managers to discuss their progress, career aspirations and their path to achieving them.
Despite the traditional benefits of performance reviews, they are often accompanied by a number of blogs and articles questioning their usefulness in today’s workplace. They’re a time-consuming exercise that falls in the middle of Q4, one of the busiest times of the year. Additionally, they tend to focus on the past, which can’t be changed, rather than the future, which can be better guided by one-on-one meetings throughout the year. This leaves some employees wondering whether annual reviews are worth their time.
However, even the most skeptical employees stand to gain from performance reviews, as they provide several ancillary benefits. While some of these benefits may be evident immediately, others may appear over time. Let’s look at a few.
Improved Writing Skills
Nearly every job requires some form of written communication, whether it be a few simple emails or several complex presentations or whitepapers. For some employees, writing comes naturally, while for others, it’s a constant struggle. But as the saying goes, practice makes perfect, and the more it’s done, the better it gets. Those whose job duties don’t involve writing on a regular basis may not have the opportunity to work on their written communication skills. Performance reviews provide the chance to write, edit and perfect a document on a subject important to all employees — their goals and accomplishments. After several years, they should be able to look back at past reviews and see improvement in their writing, as well as their achievements.
Record Of Accomplishments
One of the first things employees should do if they’re applying for a promotion or starting a job search is to gather a list of their accomplishments. Performance numbers, projects they’ve completed, blogs and articles they’ve written, presentations they’ve given — these can all be added to resumes, LinkedIn profiles, personal websites, or submitted with job applications and used to demonstrate subject matter expertise. Though not everyone keeps detailed files of past projects or a “brag book” of accomplishments, performance reviews can provide a chronological list of what was done, when, and how it benefited the department or company.
Guaranteed Facetime
The end of the year is a busy time for everyone, especially managers. In a perfect world, employees would have easy access to managers’ calendars, enabling them to schedule weekly or monthly one-on-ones to discuss past and future goals. But even for the most well-intentioned managers, plans change, schedules fill up and meetings with employees get canceled as end-of-year deadlines approach. Performance reviews are the exception, providing employees guaranteed one-on-one time (either in person or virtually) with their manager during the busiest time of the year to ensure their career is on track as they head into the new year.
Confidence Boost
Mental wellness has been an important workplace topic lately, and a positive attitude is essential to employee engagement and productivity. If positivity starts to wane, there’s no better motivator than a detailed list of one’s past goals and accomplishments. Over time, it becomes more challenging for employees to remember individual goals from previous years and all the hard work that went into achieving them. However, this information is clearly detailed on performance reviews, and reading through past successes and manager affirmations can feel pretty good.
Employees don’t have a choice as to whether or not they participate in performance reviews. Those whose employers administer annual reviews should try to look at their advantages and what they can gain from them. An effective review process is more than just an employee report card — it’s a way of ensuring workers are reaching goals that are mutually beneficial to themselves and their company. But the ancillary benefits of performance reviews can provide employees with some extra assistance they may not even realize they need. By understanding this, they can learn to appreciate the review process and utilize it to its fullest extent.
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