Every employee is familiar with the traditional employee performance appraisal. For many, it’s a yearly, high-stress meeting with their manager that determines whether they’ll get a promotion or a performance improvement plan. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The real problem? Performance appraisals don’t happen frequently enough to drive real improvement. They don’t allow managers to give constructive feedback when it’s needed most, which underserves both managers and employees.
That’s why it’s time to move beyond backward-looking reviews towards something new: performance acceleration.
Key Takeaways
An employee performance appraisal is a formal meeting, usually between an employee and their direct manager, that covers an employee’s performance, their progress toward their goals, and their accomplishments. Sometimes, performance appraisals involve HR or leadership, especially when promotions are on the table.
A performance appraisal can also be called a performance review or an employee evaluation.
At its core, a performance appraisal accomplishes the following:
In most organizations, performance appraisals are a yearly event. In some, however, they can be as frequent as twice a year or quarterly.
Performance appraisals serve an essential function: aligning managers and employees on performance. They surface performance issues, highlight successes, and chart a path for future growth. But this traditional approach has its flaws:
While performance appraisals have their issues, they can serve a key role in a broader strategy: performance acceleration.
These three terms might seem interchangeable at first, but they refer to distinct concepts.
A performance appraisal is a yearly, twice a year, or quarterly evaluation of an employee’s past performance. Managers and employees sit together and look back towards what an employee has accomplished and where they struggled. There are usually conversations about what an employee hopes to achieve next, but that’s not the focus of the appraisal.
Performance management is a broader system for setting goals, tracking progress, and managing employee performance. A performance appraisal is a tool within the performance management toolbox. Other tools in that toolbox include goal-setting, manager check-ins, peer feedback, and career pathing.
Performance acceleration is a continuous approach to assessing performance that focuses on improving employee performance in real-time rather than checking in once a year. If performance management is your overall strategy, performance acceleration is a tactic within that strategy. Performance acceleration involves adding more touchpoints to review performance, focusing on skill development, and guiding employees through a career path rather than discussing potential promotions once a year.
Performance acceleration isn’t meant to replace performance appraisals. Appraisals still have a key role to play. But they need to be more frequent and more holistic if they’re going to contribute to a broader performance acceleration strategy.
Performance appraisals shouldn’t be your end-all-be-all performance management tool. Here’s how you can improve the way you use appraisals, as part of a broader performance acceleration strategy.
Annual performance appraisals force managers and employees to condense every performance conversation they should be having into a single session. Continuous feedback creates more touchpoints for managers and employees to review performance, from daily asynchronous check-ins to weekly manager 1-on-1s. This approach gives managers a real-time understanding of employee performance and employees a clearer understanding of expectations.
Too often, performance conversations are completely disconnected from an employee’s goals—if goals have even been set. Performance appraisals that focus exclusively on past performance give little room for employees to know what they should work on in the coming year. Managers can work with employees to set clear goals using methodologies like SMART or OKRs. From there, goal outcomes tie into career pathing and promotions.
Managers have a variety of check-ins at their disposal, but too few actually use them. Asynchronous check-ins, like chat app messages or emails, allow employees to share short updates and surface blockers quickly. Regular 1-on-1s can include performance conversations, giving managers a better sense of how employees are doing over time.
Performance conversations shouldn’t just cover future goals or improvements employees need to make. Recognizing strengths and accomplishments regularly doesn’t just keep employees motivated, it also gives them essential feedback they can use to take on their next goal.
Performance conversations often focus on what’s already happened. A performance acceleration strategy should put as much—if not more—focus on what’s going to happen (i.e., the skills employees will build and their career trajectory).
With dedicated performance management tools, every check-in and performance appraisal becomes a data point in a broader trend. Managers can use these tools to analyze performance in real time, run better performance appraisals, and help employees as they move through their careers.
Want to see what a tool like this can do? Check out 15Five.
An effective employee performance appraisal includes:
Here’s what an example of a performance appraisal might look like.
Employee: Marketing Coordinator, Q2 review
Self-assessment excerpt: “I led the relaunch of our email nurture sequence this quarter and hit our 15% open-rate goal. I need to get more comfortable presenting campaign results to leadership.”
Manager feedback: “The email nurture relaunch exceeded its goal and your segmentation approach is now adopted by two other teams. This demonstrates a strong, specific impact. One area to keep building on: some campaign briefs went out without clear success metrics attached, making it harder to evaluate their results.”
Progress against goals: Open-rate goal of 15% was exceeded (18%). Stretch goal of reducing unsubscribe rate by 2% not yet met.
Development goals: Build confidence presenting results to leadership. Shadow one stakeholder meeting this quarter, then co-present the next one.
Next-steps and follow-up cadence: Revisit campaign brief template in next 1-on-1 two weeks from now. Check in on unsubscribe-rate goal at mid-quarter check-in.
Dedicated performance management platforms empower managers to run better performance appraisals and use the results of every appraisal to support a forward-looking performance acceleration strategy. 15Five helps managers make appraisals more robust, get better data from each appraisal, and better support employees as they work towards their goals. That’s done through:
The result? Better conversations, stronger managers, more team alignment, and continuous growth. See how it’s done with a free demo.
An employee performance appraisal is a formal evaluation of an employee’s performance, led by that employee’s direct manager. It includes a review of their goals, their strengths, and areas for improvement. It will typically also guide employees in setting goals for the coming year.
Performance appraisals and performance reviews are essentially the same thing. “Appraisal” is a more formal term, while “review” is what’s typically used by modern organizations.
Employee performance appraisals typically happen annually, twice a year, or quarterly. Ideally, you should have more appraisals throughout the year, with quarterly being best. Otherwise, it’s difficult for managers to consistently track and evaluate an employee’s performance.
A performance appraisal should typically include:
Annual performance appraisals have significant limitations, including:
Many companies are moving towards more frequent performance appraisals or continuous performance management systems that give real-time signals on employee performance.
Performance acceleration is a continuous approach to performance management that aims on improving employee performance in real-time, rather than through a yearly performance appraisal. It creates touchpoints where managers and employees can discuss performance throughout the year.
Performance appraisals still have an essential role to play as a checkpoint of sorts for alignment between managers and employees. But they shouldn’t be the only time you discuss performance.
Shifting to continuous performance improvement means using performance appraisals as a tool in a larger toolbox, supporting a performance acceleration strategy. This strategy gives managers more insight into how employees work, creates clearer expectations for employees, and gradually improves performance for the organization at large.
Want to see how a dedicated performance management tool like 15Five can support this? Learn more here.