Guidelines for a Good Peer Review ProcessNovember 4th, 2009 |
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I came across this post about peer reviews on the Evil HR Lady blog and immediately shuddered. Who doesn’t recall a time when they have been asked to give feedback on a peer as part of their performance appraisal process and tempered their feedback to the point of uselessness – or avoided the task entirely? To sum up:
Every year we are asked to fill out evaluation forms, supposedly anonymously, about our coworkers… The end of the form has areas for narrative writing about areas of strength and weaknesses. Since we basically know which people are filling out the forms on us, we usually can figure out exactly who wrote what about us. I find this to cause a great amount of stress, divisiveness and unhappiness amongst the coworkers.
Yikes! I can recall that exact same scenario clearly. Early in my career, I was working at a professional services firm with many young, eager staffers. Peer reviews were important because of the project-based nature of our work. But, not surprisingly, peer feedback was way too easy to connect with specific co-workers, often because projects were diverse and situations were specific. Other times you knew because the firm had a highly competitive environment; you already knew who was “out to get you.” Everyone dreaded this part of the review process, and I can’t say it encouraged us to perform better overall. In fact, I think we all just tried to pick our “friends” to complete our peer reviews, and to be very careful what we actually said out our peers when completing their appraisal. Where’s the value in that? It’s hardly strategic from an organizational perspective!
So how can we improve the process? In response to this anxiety, Evil HR Lady has some general good guidelines for a peer review process:
I think that as a general employee review process, that directly impacts raises, bonuses, etc., that the feedback should be collected and given to the manager. The manager then writes the review and uses that information to help him do so, not as a substitute for doing it himself.
An automated performance management solution that integrates multi-rater feedback can address all these concerns and fits the bill exactly for what the Evil HR lady recommends. Raters can be selected by the manager, the results remain anonymous to the employee, and most importantly the extra valuable information that comes from peer reviews is at the manager’s fingertips for consideration when writing the appraisal.
Tags: employee performance appraisal, employee performance management, multi-rater feedbackRelated posts
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