The Performance Review Meeting

It’s time. Your employee shows up, anxious, nervous, stressed, excited, filled with equal parts energy and dread, and they’re looking across the table (figuratively or literally) at you, waiting for you to pronounce their fate.

No pressure, right?

First things first: Tell everybody in the room (your employee and yourself, both) to take a deep breath. If you’ve done your homework, and you’ve been communicating for the past cycle what your concerns have been, along with your praise and encouragement, then there should be no surprises here, and you can say as much. As a matter of fact, that’s how I prefer to open my formal performance reviews: “Hey, Joshua. As you know, I am a firm believer of the idea that a performance review should never be a surprise, so I think most of what we will be talking about today will be material we’ve talked about before. Ready to go?” Most of the employee’s nervous energy will be from the ambiguity—and outright fear—of anticipating a surprise kick to the teeth, so opening with a “There will be no surprises here” will generally calm them down. Remind them (and yourself) that this is intended as a partnership between you, and the goal of this meeting is to do everything we can to get the employee to be the best they can be.

Point out that you are obligated (you don’t need to say by whom) to take notes during the meeting. Use pen and paper—now is not the time to let a computer screen get between you and them. If the review is over a video conference meeting, I’d still suggest pen and paper; the physical feedback of seeing your head go down to make a note makes it clear when you are taking a note, while if you’re typing on the screen they can’t really tell if you’re writing notes or responding to a chat message or working on your resume.

Next, it’s time to go over the written review. If you can, deliver it to them about ...