Regular interviews with employees regarding their performance and future career are not the most popular managers' tasks. That is, however, why managers should not underestimate and neglect these interviews so that they don't have to repeat them "again and better." Not discouraging good employees from their interest for further cooperation and helping the worse ones to improve remains, of course, the main goal. No employee should leave the performance interview with a feeling of being misunderstood or even humiliated. Humancapitalleague.com recommends managers to avoid the following missteps.
1. Don't judge only the recent performance and don't do it negatively
An employee who have performed well throughout the whole evaluation period should not hear from you that he is a bad employee because he made a mistake a week ago.
2. Don't "miss the bus" with your feedback
Feedback the disclosure of which will serve an employee the most when provided immediately should not be expressed half a year later. You should have tools and processes for sharing feedback throughout the whole year to which you can return during the evaluation.
3. Beware of too much negativity
Try to go through all the negative aspects of individual employees' evaluation in advance and consider how it would seem to you if you were in their shoes. Omit negative expressions which can probably not help to reach a higher performance. Refrain from personality traits.
4. Don't criticize generally
Try to stick to measurable values. You can, for example, criticize a salesperson for not meeting a defined volume of sales. If you, however, only say that he/she "is not good enough", it does not say anything about the performance. When you criticize, you should always know how you can measure the employee's improvements in the criticized behavior.
5. Don't come up with surprising information
During the performance interview, an employee should not learn anything surprising you have not already talked about together.
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