Annual performance reviews have been a part of employee lives for quite a long time. The idea behind this is simple. Basically, an employee works for 12 months and at the end of the performance cycle, meets with their manager to discuss their job performance during those 12 months. During this discussion, the manager informs the employee as to whether or not they have earned a pay raise for the following year.
Work environments today are rapidly changing, and all the buzz in the corporate world is about the mid year performance review. Conducting employee reviews on a bi-annual instead of on an annual basis only has proven to increase employee job satisfaction and build a great organizational culture as the mid-year review is disconnected from remuneration. As a matter of fact, a recent study from Joblist.com discovered that employees who receive regular feedback during mid-year informal meetings were significantly more motivated at work compared to employees who received reviews only at the end of the year.
What Is A Mid-Year Review?
A mid year performance review is an evaluation in which a manager meets with employees near the end of the 2nd quarter to assess employee progress on key job tasks and evaluate goals. Note that employees should be able to easily find key job requirements in their individual position descriptions.
Managers can also use this time to coach employees on how to make any performance changes needed before their more in-depth year end review is conducted. A bi-annual review can be either informal or formal, depending on your organizational needs.
A formal mid year performance review can be as detailed as the year end review and include a formal evaluation and feedback from the manager, as well as 360-degree assessments by the employees. The more informal approach can be considered as more of a way to check in with employees mid-year. This allows managers and their employees to have a much more relaxed conversation about general performance. This also offers a great opportunity to discuss a team member’s progress in regards to previously established goals, and provide top level feedback for key focus areas going forward.
Why is a Once-A-Year Performance Review Not Enough?
There can often be a lack of strong communication between employees and their managers within an organization. A person managing says, 50-100 employees, can’t really be expected to conduct effective year end reviews effectively at once. Conducting their reviews every six months instead helps to streamline the process and reduce the overall burden for the manager.
Let’s face it – we live in a fast paced world and people struggle to remember what they did two weeks ago, much less 10 months ago. It would be naive to think that managers will remember everything every employee did in relation to job performance over the past year. The best way to address this issue? Divide and conquer.
Why Should We Conduct Mid-Year Reviews?
The bottom line is this: the year-end review should not be the only time throughout the year that an employee has the opportunity to formally engage with their managers about job performance, nor should it be the only time managers offer meaningful feedback or discuss concerns with their employees. This is especially true as year end reviews happen under the constant pressure of remuneration changes.
Allowing a full year to pass between performance reviews can make it hard to achieve substantive, actionable, and meaningful results and feedback. Year-end reviews are often reduced to a formality put in place to check off the HR list. A mid year performance review can actually give the year end review more focus and greater purpose.
Mid-year reviews allow managers to:
- Offer feedback in a more relaxed environment, unlike year-end reviews that are connected to heavy consequences like promotions and pay raises.
- Strengthen the relationships between themselves and their employees.
- Provide future-focused, and actionable feedback through a future forward lens, and motivate team members to succeed over the next 6 months.
- Address and fix problems before the year-end review by ensuring that team members know how they are performing and what changes are required of them to excel by the end of the year.
- Align expectations by letting employees know if they are meeting, exceeding, or underperforming your expectations, thereby giving them a chance to improve before the formal year-end review.
- Engage with your high-performing employees to bolster engagement by recognizing their achievements, offering new challenges, and seeking their ideas and feedback, while helping employees to feel valued as an important part of the team.
- Plan training and goals for low performers that will encourage them to be more engaged and more successful in their roles.
The mid year performance review:
- Must be structured in a way that gets the most amount of input from the employee.
- Include clearly laid out manager expectations that are easy for the employee to understand.
- Conclude with descriptive actionable goals that must be achieved before the year end review.
Conclusion
The mid year performance review meeting allows you to focus on your employees and discuss the obstacles facing them at work. This review is not meant to be used as a replacement for regular check-ins or continuous feedback. Instead, it provides managers with a way to re-group employees to focus on the next 6 months of the performance cycle.
Organizations that conduct mid year reviews can expect better job performance between year end reviews, which also results in less confrontations about expectations that were laid out the previous year.
Mid-year reviews are a great addition to your performance management strategy, offering a powerful tool to establish a productive, valued, and engaged workforce that feels supported and appreciated by the employer.
At $3 per employee per month, the AssessTEAM cloud-based performance review software is the perfect fit for businesses of every size and in every industry. With prebuilt 1000+ job goals and 3000s of performance indicators, you can always be sure you are conducting a thorough performance review of each employee. Contact us today to learn more!