Ideas for Festive & Inclusive Workplace Holiday Celebrations
Find festive and inclusive workplace holiday celebration ideas to boost and strengthen team bonds and show employee appreciation.
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Today, performance reviews are essential tool for ensuring employee motivation and growth.
Today, performance reviews are an essential tool for ensuring employee motivation and growth. But, for that statement to be true, the performance review itself must resonate with the employee. The employee must see it as an opportunity to learn more about how they performed and how they can improve their performance in the future.
In short, employees should be eager to attend their performance reviews, rather than nervous or hesitant. Do you remember getting performance reviews? How did you feel about them? Did you learn anything during your own reviews? Did it seem as though the manager giving the performance review would rather be doing anything else? Or was your performance review fun and informative?
Now that you are the one giving performance reviews, you’ve got a lot to think about before preparing each review. Performance reviews should never just be as simple as a run-by-the-numbers checklist. Rather, they should be customized towards each individual’s particular traits to be truly effective.
To aid in this endeavor, there are a number of useful performance review tools and performance management software packages you can utilize. These manager tools are particularly useful now that performance reviews have evolved due to increasing numbers of remote workers and hybrid offices. Keep reading to learn more about how performance reviews have changed and how they can be a key component in ensuring employee retention.
The Changing Face of Performance Reviews
There was a time not too long ago when many companies were abandoning performance reviews altogether. Manages hated giving them, and employees hated receiving them. Instead, informal reviews and occasional management check-ins became the standard in many corporations. But the problem wasn’t actually the performance review itself, but rather how they were conducted.
Too many performance reviews focused on what employees were doing wrong instead of recognizing their hard work and achievements or offering opportunities for learning and growth. Managers used poor performance reviews as an excuse to deny promotions and raises, and this only served to demotivate employees further.
However, with the development of helpful performance review tools and a better understanding of both employee and manager expectations, the performance review has evolved to become more effective than ever. With an emphasis on positive feedback and a recognition of an employee’s contributions, performance reviews have grown to become a positive employee experience.
Performance Reviews and a Remote Workforce
Have you had to give a performance review to your remote workers yet? How do you think it went? If a remote workforce is a relatively new concept for your company, then making that transition was likely difficult at the start. Figuring out how to give performance reviews remotely also comes with its unique challenges. Performance management software makes this task easier, but there are other tips you can follow to maximize your performance reviews for the benefit of both the company and the employee.
Employee Performance Review Tips
For starters, get rid of the idea that performance reviews should only be an annual occurrence. There is little hope of strong company alignment if employees only get feedback on their performance once a year. You can set your own schedule, but monthly or bi-monthly reviews might be more ideally suited to enabling managers and employees to stay on the same page. Then, improve your performance management with a Manager Feedback template, a performance review tool that provides an employee with a better sense of their performances and opportunities for growth and improvement.
Make Performance Reviews More Engaging
The performance review shouldn’t be one-sided. Instead, you should invite questions and feedback from the employee. Manager tools and performance review software packages such as Assembly can help you improve upon the performance review content and context. For example, you can help improve employee happiness and become better aware of employee aspirations and career development desires with a Development Survey Flow template.
Focus on the Future
While many performance reviews tend to focus on the past, more effective reviews will instead focus on the future. Discuss how things can be improved in the future, rather than focusing on mistakes or things that didn’t go well that can no longer be fixed.
Be Objective
Performance reviews should be based on facts, not opinions or your personal feelings about a particular employee. Collect data about an employee’s accomplishments, challenges, goal progress, and more, and put this all together into a cohesive and transparent review. Use performance review phrases that serve to inspire and recognize employee achievement. The 360° Review performance review tool can help with this.
Make Time and Be Prepared
Performance reviews should never appear to be rushed, unorganized meetings. You should be fully prepared and have ample time set aside to perform a positive and meaningful review. Appearing as though you have more important things to do will set a negative tone right from the start and impact the effectiveness of the evaluation.
In Conclusion
Well-thought and professionally conducted performance reviews that focus on encouraging and improving employee performance can greatly benefit the employee and your company as a whole. Check out the performance review templates from Assembly for great aid in improving performance management.
Get the foundational knowledge on creating an employee recognition program that boosts employee engagement and helps them feel valued.
Explore GuideYes, at Assembly, security is a top priority. Each quarter, we have ongoing security work that is everyone’s responsibility. While we maintain a strong security posture, it was important for us to prove to our customers that we do everything we claim to do. This led us to pursue a SOC 2 Type II report that would provide evidence of our compliance with industry gold-standard security practice.
There is study after study showing that employee recognition leads to increased engagement. This in return creates an environment where employees are happier and more motivated which increase productivity and reduces voluntary turnover significantly. In order to filled critical roles, companies tend to spend nearly twice the value of an annual salary. Assembly is an investment in your employees that supports your bottom line.
Yes, we will offer contracts for companies with longer-term agreements to help larger customers have more certainty around future costs.
The minimum agreement term is a 12-month subscription.
We do and for FREE! Any new customer needing further support to get started with Assembly to ensure you're set up for success can request custom onboarding support. Improving your employee experience is about much more than just using our amazing software; it’s about transforming your business to create a workplace that people love. That’s much easier to do with the personal support and advice from our passionate people experts.
At the time of redemption (when your employees exchange their points for a paid reward) you'll pay face value. If a reward is a $10 Amazon gift card, your cost will be $10. All paid rewards are billed for on a monthly basis.
The good news is that you don't have to pay for rewards upfront because we only charge you when points are redeemed, not when they're earned.
We offer discounts or educational or charitable organizations. In order to secure a discount, you'll first need to book a demo with a customer support specialist.
For all other organizations, we are willing to consider longer-term agreements in exchange for discounts. To set up annual plans or longer, you will need to book a demo with a customer support specialist.
If you're on a month to month plan, you can go here and cancel anytime. If you're having concerns or need help setting up your account for success, you can always book a demo with a customer support specialist.
If you're on a longer-term custom plan, you'll need to reach out to your customer support specialist to cancel your account or email us at support@joinassembly.com.
Great question! You can customize your core values to match your organization's to boost and track alignment. You can change your currency from the 🏆 emoji (our default) to any emoji of your choice. You can swap our logo for your own. You can also set up company culture rewards such as, "Lunch with the CEO," "Buy a book on us," and so much more!
While we recommend a peer to peer set up where anyone in your organization can give or receive recognition, you can set up Assembly however you want. If you need to limit the people who can give or receive recognition, that's perfectly fine and can be done from your Admin, here.
Assembly connects to the tools your employees use every day to offer an easy, seamless experience with minimal change management.
Assembly has integrations with HCM/HRIS systems like ADP, Google, Office 365, and Slack. We also integrate with communication tools like Slack and Teams so you and your employees can access Assembly wherever they work now.
That depends on the company's permissions set up. That said, over 90% of the employees on Assembly's platform are recognized on a monthly basis. That means nearly every employee across all of our customers are receiving regular recognition from their peers, managers, or leadership. We're extremely proud of this.
They are not required. You can use Assembly without having rewards set up. However, we don't recommend it if you intend to have a high adoption and usage rate. You can always keep the costs down by offering internal culture rewards that are fulfilled by you internally.
No, you can remove allowances from anyone or everyone. It's up to you but we do recommend using points whether they're worth a real dollar value or not. Companies that use points have a much higher engagement rate even if those points don't exchange for real dollars.
Please schedule time with an expert and we will help you to get all your questions answered