Performance management process tips from an ex-BBC HR Director

Lucy Adams, founder and CEO of Disruptive HR, is one of the most influential names in the HR sector. With a wealth of experience in senior HR positions, including Director of HR at the BBC, Lucy has spent the past decade collaborating with HR teams and leaders from some of the world's most renowned brands. She grew frustrated with the lack of innovation and fresh thinking in the profession and wanted to find new ways of tackling old problems. That's why she created Disruptive HR - an agency dedicated to challenging conventional practices, reimagining HR strategies, and doing things differently.

In this guest blog, Lucy brings her experience to an area that many small and medium businesses struggle with: the performance management process. Where traditional performance management approaches are proving increasingly ineffective, Lucy shares what works better.

As someone who has spent years in HR, leading it at major organisations, running my own business at Disruptive HR, and working with small and medium-sized businesses along the way, I've seen how annual objectives, rigid feedback cycles, and traditional ways of measuring performance often miss the mark today.

Today I'll delve into why these traditional methods fall short - and explore real changes that you can implement to drive better performance and employee engagement. 

The starting point for improving performance management processes

Lots of businesses spend a lot of time on performance management processes and ask a lot from their managers and employees. But, does it work? Are we getting it right? And are employees feeling motivated?

When I was at the BBC, we reviewed our processes – changing ratings, altering how many pages our performance reviews were and making it smoother and easier. Or so we thought...

When delivering a presentation, I was met with questions as to why I was bringing something to the table that was seen as demotivating. I couldn't believe it at the time - I genuinely thought I'd come up with something to really help the team.

I knew I wasn't alone, in the past HR processes always followed this structure. But actually – all I had done was create more paperwork in a different way. Over the years, we've tended to focus on training people to complete this paperwork, rather than thinking about what this actually does to, or for, people.

The good news? Things have been and are changing – in a big way. So, let's take a look at the traditional approaches and what the alternative ways of doing things look like.

Annual objectives and goal setting is a waste of time

Traditional objective setting has long been a staple for performance management. However, this reporting cycle simply doesn't align with the dynamic nature of today's world. By clinging to annual objectives, you can hinder rather than drive performance.

So what's wrong with annual performance management goals?

Annual objectives can't keep up with the rapid pace of the world today – what made sense in January as an objective, is most likely to be entirely irrelevant by December.

Another reason we know this doesn't work is that, come appraisal time, you'll find managers and employees asking for copies of their objectives, as they've forgotten where they've been saved or even what they agreed as objectives (because it was that long ago).

Realistically, objective-setting should be an ongoing process. It doesn't necessarily need to align with other annual business reporting cycles.

Instead, refreshed, relevant and immediate employee objectives is what will lead to better business performance and people successes.

The dreaded annual review

While it was a few years ago now, in the performance management webinar I worked on with Breathe, the polls showed that one of the top challenges for small and medium-sized businesses running performance reviews, was that managers don't like doing them.

I don't think that's changed and it's totally understandable. Managers in small businesses are time-poor and often haven't received any formal training on how to handle the conversations or performance management processes they're being asked to follow. Most importantly, a lot of managers don't believe that performance management processes will actually help improve performance.

But if you have tools that work and are helpful for you and your team, I've found that they usually get used.

One of the big tasks often put on managers’ shoulders, are the dreaded annual appraisals. Where they book a meeting room and sit down and say “I am going to give you some feedback” – the eight words to make any employee shudder. It leads to employees being defensive, rather than open, and often makes them feel like they're being told what to do (in a similar way to the parental dynamic).

And – it's a pointless exercise. As humans, we can only change one behaviour at a time. So being tasked with changing numerous things won't happen. Feedback needs to be in the moment. Moving away from annual structured performance reviews and towards a culture of continuous feedback helps employees understand performance expectations and lowers defensiveness. Documenting that feedback also creates a clear, ongoing record to refer back to in the future if needed.

Keeping consistent, accurate and up-to-date records of your performance conversations, the support you've offered, and what's been agreed is generally best practice. It helps everyone remember what was discussed, while providing useful evidence if disciplinary or dismissal proceedings become necessary.

This doesn’t mean pages of paperwork and it doesn’t need to be complicated. After a regular one-to-one or check-in, jot down two or three lines in your HR system or a shared document: what you talked about, anything you agreed to, and the date. Do that as a matter of habit, for every conversation, not just the difficult ones, and you'll build a fair, consistent record without ever sitting down to write a formal report.

Performance ratings and falling short in performance appraisals

Ever walked into what you expect to be a great performance review and been hit with a ‘meets expectations'? It's like a punch in the gut for anyone's morale. It brings a sense of disappointment, especially if you've had a good year.

It tends to be bonus related. But judging people and giving them a number for a year's worth of work isn't an effective mechanism for assessing performance.

Measuring performance is a hard task, typically because it's very subjective and managers are subject to rater bias. Even if we think we're unbiased, as humans there are inherent biases present in our assessments - so the data isn't reliable and the numbers don't actually mean much.

I used to have a client who operated a system where if employees got the lowest performance rating twice in a row, then they were immediately put on a performance improvement plan. To play it out, the manager would just swap the lowest rating between each member of the team at their annual review, so that none of their employees would have to be put in that position. That's just one example amongst many where we focus on performance management processes rather than actual employee performance.

The 3 alternatives you need to try

1. Switch to an employee-owned approach to managing performance

If your managers have been owning employee goals and managing employee reviews, ask yourself this - can people actually manage someone else's performance? Surely it's down to the individual whether they're going to perform or not.

Yes, individuals will need support and coaching, but in the end, it's about an employee's will and desire to shape their performance.

It's time to move employees away from performance management as something that is done to them, and towards something that the individual owns and drives.

Here's an example. Vistaprint got rid of all appraisal ratings, forms, and their annual cycle and said instead, that every employee is responsible for their own feedback. They need to ask colleagues, managers and people they work with for feedback – and the manager's role?

To help make sense of the constructive feedback the employees are receiving. Rather than a once a year exercise to the person, people can do this for themselves, with the flexibility of doing this as often as they'd like.

This is known as ongoing feedback, and when formalised, the process of asking colleagues of different levels of seniority, is called 360 feedback.

River Island have adopted a similar regular feedback approach and have found this really works to also support career development. This helps drive people's motivation to own their career and talk about where they want to go, rather than employees saying something like “Oh, I haven't been given a career development meeting.”

When companies encourage employees to ask for feedback and give them the reins to steer their own development, it creates an environment where everyone's able to constantly improve.

2. Focus on team performance management methods

Rather than always focusing on one-to-ones and the individual, we know that work happens in teams. So rather than thinking about individual performance management, consider the team performance and put your focus into this.

Buffer are a great example of this. They treat goal setting as a collaborative exercise that involves employees across the entire team. Rather than cascading down, employees contribute to the overarching goals, giving space to discussions and debate. These goals are reviewed regularly at a team level.

This is a great place to start and can be followed by team reviews, meaning that instead of reviews being done on a one-to-one basis, you can review team performance as a team.

Here's an example that I experienced working at the BBC. The News at 10 team were a really high-performing team and I was curious to see what they were doing, compared to other teams that had lower performance.

One of the key things they did was a regular review as a team about their performance. They would meet after the news had gone out and question how it had gone between them. The big factor? The team leader would start with themselves, by critiquing their own performance within the team. What impact did this have? It created an environment that was psychologically safe to review their own performance. A sophisticated peer-to-peer review, in an honest and transparent way set by the tone of the leader.

3. Swap a formal performance management cycle for something 'process-lite' and agile

It's time to get rid of bureaucracy, get rid of the annual cycle, and get rid of the ratings. Focus on human interactions. That's where performance improvement comes from, your people – not traditional frameworks.

Whether it's managers helping employees with course correction or employees asking for feedback, creating fluid performance management is what actually works.

At Atlassian, they focus on weekly check-ins, with managers asking their employees three simple questions:

1. What are your priorities?

2. How can I help you?

3. How are you feeling?

These are the types of questions that genuinely help to improve performance and consider the employee as a human being. Companies really don't need to overcomplicate things. Regular check-ins like these make your team feel supported and help you identify performance issues early, before they become bigger problems.

What about poor performance?

When you spot that someone's performance has dipped, don't wait to act, but there's no need to jump into a formal disciplinary and performance improvement plan straight away.

Start with an honest, direct conversation: what's not working, specifically, and why it matters. Ask what's getting in the way, whether that's unclear expectations, a mismatch with their job responsibilities, a skills gap, workload, or something else entirely, and agree on support that would actually help. That might be coaching, shadowing someone more experienced, or simply setting clear expectations about what "good" looks like.

Give a genuine, realistic amount of time to improve, and check in properly during that period rather than waiting for the next scheduled review to see whether it's worked.

And just like with regular performance conversations, it's worth keeping a simple record of what's discussed, any support or actions agreed, and how things progress.

Get this process right, and you're not just protecting the business from risk. You're giving people a genuinely fair shot at turning things around, which is really what good performance management is about in the first place.

Convincing people it's time to change the way you manage employee performance

If you're someone trying to persuade your leaders or need help to steer your company to change performance management processes, there are some great stats out there to help push this over the line.

Here's why traditional performance management doesn't work:

• It's time-consuming. Most traditional annual performance review meetings take an hour. If you've got 50 employees, that's 50 hours gone before you've even factored in the prep beforehand, the write-ups afterward, or the mountains of paperwork that traditional processes demand.

• It doesn't motivate employees to improve performance. A recent survey showed that 35% of professionals felt less optimistic about their role after their most recent appraisal and that only 16% felt more positive about the future. Research by Gallup also shows that only 2 in 10 employees strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.

• Managers aren't set up to do it well: 82% of managers enter their role with no formal management or leadership training. (Chartered Management Institute) 

  
  

Bringing it together 

If you're looking to move away from traditional performance management, it could be worth piloting one small area first, so you're not tackling everything at once. That can feel overwhelming for both managers and employees.

Before changing any outdated practices you currently use, consider your main objective. Think about who owns this, how you'll set objectives moving forward, if you'll move from annual reviews to more regular check-ins and how frequent they'll be. How will you go about monitoring progress along the way? And will you kick ratings to the curb altogether? However light-touch you go, make sure to keep a simple record of your performance conversations, not just when things go wrong, so people are treated fairly and consistently.

Once you've got a clear purpose to your performance management, you'll be able to embrace flexibility, feedback and continuous improvement, unleashing your business and people's full potential. Remember – it's about approach, not process.

Keep exploring

Want to hear more from Lucy? Watch our webinar on how small and medium businesses are making HR simpler for more practical, real-world tips like these. Or visit the Disruptive HR website.

Or if you're looking for software to support the changes we've talked about, Breathe is getting a whole host of new features to help support your performance management processes including one-to-ones, 360 feedback, review cycles and a way to connect company goals to personal goals and daily tasks. Take a look. 

And if you could use some help training managers on handling performance conversations, the Breathe Growth Academy has a free performance management training course for line managers. It's bite-sized and on-demand, so it's the perfect introduction to performance management processes for busy managers in small businesses.