The Most Important Meeting of the Week

Once you've established your goals, they can then inform routine feedback, one-on-ones, and performance reviews. If you’re just getting started with continuous feedback, start by making one-on-one meetings a priority for all managers and employees. One-on-ones are regular check-ins (we recommend weekly) that allow employees to raise issues with their managers, and allow managers to deliver feedback, praise employee successes, and help employees make adjustments where necessary. The one-on-one, as Ben Horowitz has said, is “the employee's meeting rather than the manager's meeting. This is the free-form meeting for all the pressing issues, brilliant ideas, and chronic frustrations that do not fit neatly into status reports, email, and other less personal and intimate mechanisms.”⁶

In Lattice's 2020 State of People Strategy Survey, we asked HR leaders to tell us the importance of various feedback actions by employees and managers, and nearly 80 percent rated manager one-on-ones as extremely to very important. Another 75 percent rated ongoing manager feedback as extremely to very important. And of those who rated performance management as a “Top 3” initiative, 78 percent ranked “continuous feedback” as a priority for 2021.

One-on-ones are a regular opportunity for managers and direct reports to communicate. Employees drive the agenda, using this time to clear any roadblocks that they might be facing, get candid feedback from their manager, and discuss their broader goals. Managers, then, are better equipped to help their reports work through obstacles, bolster new ideas, and ensure that they are continuing down a path of success to helping the team meet its objectives. These free-form meetings should be a manager's most important meeting of the week (and prioritized as such), helping them and the company as a whole understand how employees feel about their work as well as their professional development. In virtual workspaces, these can become even more vital, ensuring that everyone remains on the same page even if they aren't in the same building.

While these meetings should always be employee-driven, managers should help guide the process, and bring up topics or questions concerning the employee as well. Encourage your direct reports to come prepared with an agenda of items they want to discuss, whether it is about their individual short- and long-term aspirations, job satisfaction, or constructive feedback about the company or the manager.

These meetings are the cornerstone of solid communication, and if conducted regularly, should ensure that employees aren't surprised by the time they reach their big review. While the principles and practice of one-on-ones may not change if they're being conducted in the conference room or over remote video chat, they take on perhaps even more importance when employees are working remotely – tethering workers to the organization's culture, even when they're not seeing their coworkers face-to-face.

Performance Reviews: The Big Checkup

If your managers are following the best practices of feedback culture, they've been keeping tabs on how each employee is performing against goals or OKRs and providing ongoing continuous feedback, course-correcting along the way. So, when it comes time for the big annual or bi-annual review, hopefully, everyone is completely prepared for what's to come.

The performance-review cycle is definitely heavy lifting for the HR team, but it's a process that will help reveal a ton of useful info about your people – from who are your top performers to which teams have great leadership, to where your employee-development challenges are.

To start the cycle, you'll need to make a few decisions:

• Who should participate? Just managers reviewing employees? Will peers do reviews? Should managers get reviewed? Should employees review their own performance? At Lattice we believe in a true 360-feedback cycle, involving managers, employees, and peers,
• How often should you do reviews? Lattice recommends reviews should be done twice a year or even quarterly. At minimum, reviews should be performed at least once a year as it creates an opportunity for you to get a full point-in-time picture of an individual's performance. We also understand that these full 360s are quite intensive, so we encourage our customers to (1) continuously solicit peer feedback (more on that following) and (2) run smaller review cycles outside of the 360 that facilitate ongoing performance and development conversations between managers and employees.

To give you a sense of how other companies handle reviews, let's look again at our State of People Strategy Survey. Eighty-nine percent of the HR professionals we surveyed said that they were running at least annual performance reviews, while 33 percent run semi-annual reviews, and 15 percent run quarterly reviews. As for who should participate, 36 percent said 360-degree feedback was their standard practice, 17 percent said they went with manager+peer feedback, 37 percent said “manager feedback only” was adequate, and the remainder went with some mix of manager with self-assessment or upward evaluation.

Next, you'll begin structuring the reviews themselves, which requires a few new decisions to make – which questions to ask and whether or not you choose to use ratings.

Performance review questions can really range widely from simple to complex and deep diving. Before drafting review questions, think about the broader category of employee qualities that you want to measure. For example:

• Leadership: How well does an employee manage other people and motivate a group of individuals?
• Project Management: How does this person approach completing their work product, and do they demonstrate strong time management skills when doing so?
• Culture: How well does this person reflect the company values?
• Career Development: What can this person do to improve their work product and working relationships at the company?
• Impact: How much of a contribution does this person make to the organization?
• Problem Solving: How does this person approach challenges? Do they employ creative ideas in solving problems?
• Communication Skills: How well does this person interact with coworkers? Do they have a positive attitude, or are they always making negative comments?

Since you don't want to overwhelm your reviewers, you'll want to select those areas that matter most to you as an organization – either currently or what you'll need in the next phase of development. If you have competency matrices, or job paths, built out, consider cross-referencing your review questions with the competencies and competency themes that you have expectations around. And if not, more to come on that in later chapters.

Next, you'll need to decide whether you'll use numerical ratings or open feedback fields for how your people will execute their reviews. Many companies prefer using ratings. Anyone who's used Yelp to pick a restaurant for dinner or perused user ratings on Amazon can understand that there's nothing more black-and-white than a rating scale. Whether you're using a 3-point, 5-point, or letter-grade system, you'll see right away who your company's managers view as the top performers, and they'll be sorted into ranked lists (especially if you're using a performance software tool like Lattice). Depending on the number of rating variables, you can parse those high performers based on specific skills or goals. And using numerical ratings mean gathering quantitative data that can help HR teams and leaders feel confident in decisions around raises and promotions.

Another advantage for using ratings: it's often very hard to get quality feedback from managers, especially during busy review periods. Writing out a review is time-consuming and, for some, extremely difficult. Data shows that managers struggle when ratings aren't an option. According to 2016 research by CEB (now Gartner), “Manager conversation quality declines by 14 percent because managers struggle to explain to employees how they performed in the past and what steps to take to improve future performance,” and “less than 5 percent of managers can effectively manage employees without [ratings.]”⁷

On the other hand, many HR leaders feel that assigning numbers discourages insightful feedback, focusing on the score instead of a true review. And if your company is trying to stay true to a “culture of feedback,” keep in mind that detailed feedback full of examples and advice versus a simple grade or star rating could go a long way to helping the actual improvement you may want to see from your people.

Looking again at our People Strategy Survey, just over 36 percent of HR pros said that they relied on an equal amount of ratings and comments for a balanced view, nearly 26 percent leaned heavily on comments with a few ratings, 21 percent were mostly reliant on ratings with a small amount of comments. Only 14 percent said that they preferred all comments and no ratings, and a tiny 1.9 percent said that they only went with ratings.

Once you roll out reviews, make sure that you have a plan to ensure that there's high participation through a strong communication plan, a generous timeline with a lot of heads-up and reminders, training for newbies, and setting goals to rally around. Once reviews are closed, then begins the hard job of analyzing results to make decisions around development budgets, promotions, and even compensation.

Remember to make time to calibrate your review scores. Why calibrate? Scores can vary widely based on the reviewer since people across your company are interpreting your grading system differently. A practical way to handle calibration is to form committees of managers’ managers who understand their people's scoring styles and can help provide context and guidance on how to interpret and level scores.

And finally, you'll need to conclude the reviews cycle across your company through a series of manager-employee meetings where they can discuss the results of the review, as well as address the question of raises or promotions. Or if this is a mid-year cycle that's more about development, be ready with action plans for how you can support learning new skills or, how to step up and meet expectations.

Delivering Feedback: Tough Conversations and Praise

If the regular flow of communication is strong, these reviews should go smoothly. Just remember, feedback should be balanced. We've all experienced the two extremes of management: the critic manager you only hear from when you screw up and the conflict-averse manager who wants to be loved above all and never delivers tough truths. I'm here to say that both of these managers are not helping your business because they're not helping your people.

Let's start with positive feedback, because when we think of “feedback,” we often tend to think of the negative kind: things we could have done better or differently or mistakes that need correcting. But giving employees praise for a job well done goes a long way to retaining top performers and motivating employees to do amazing work. Just to list a few stats around recognition:

• An OC Tanner study showed that 79 percent of people who quit their jobs cite “lack of appreciation” as their reason for leaving.
• A Zenger & Folkman survey found that 69 percent of employees said they would work harder if they felt their efforts were better recognized.
• And a Towers Watson study showed that organizations that place a heavy emphasis on praising and recognizing employee achievements showed engagement scores increase by nearly 60 percent.

At Lattice, one of our most popular product features, both internally as well as with our customers, is our Praise feature that lets employees and managers share positive feedback either privately or publicly (see Figure 3.2). Public praise sent through Lattice sends a shout-out through a company-wide Slack channel or via another public chat platform, even allowing users to tag the feedback with what company values the “win” represents and allowing other employees to add on with emojis or replies.

One thing to keep in mind: not everyone enjoys public recognition! Managers should make it part of their onboarding practice of getting to know employees to find out whether they prefer praise publicly or privately. The last thing you want to do is to make recognition uncomfortable.

But even in a good feedback culture, things sometimes need a little extra work. Perhaps you notice a pattern in an employee's work, be it a behavior that is getting in the way or a similar mistake being made again and again. Maybe you notice them struggling a bit, and some constructive criticism could help them develop into the employee you know they can become. In any case, constructive feedback is the heart of a good company culture. It can certainly help increase productivity and efficiency, but it can also help the employee grow.

Constructive feedback – that is, raising where someone's behavior, output, or result didn't match your expectations in some way – should be deployed regularly and should always be delivered as part of a conversation. As Rabois, the investor, once told me: “People tend to procrastinate about it, they tend to defer – almost like writing an essay in college – because it takes a lot of work to do well, and the news isn't always pleasant, therefore you tend to hope it goes away but it almost never does.” Like the old-school performance reviews we discussed above, we all have that classic image in our heads of the stern boss lecturing employees about productivity or coming down hard on them for every little mistake. But that's neither the most effective nor the most reasonable way to get the most out of your employees. In these difficult conversations, it's important to make it clear that you and the employee are on the same team – approaching the issue as a problem that you can solve together, rather than some deficiency that they need to correct on their own. This will help ensure that the focus remains on the challenge at hand and help both the manager and the employee work together to come up with a strategy to correct course.

If you're noticing some of those common scenarios where you want to deliver some constructive feedback, here are some starter scripts to initiate the conversation:

When You're Noticing a Pattern

When an employee is constantly making the same mistake or has a bad work habit, you have to address it with specific examples. You have the fact that it's a repeated behavior to support why you're bringing it up, but you can't let them continue the bad behavior only to spring it on them months later during their performance review.

• Sample script: “I've noticed that you've been late to the morning meeting several times this month. We understand you have a difficult commute, but this can be really disruptive to your coworkers. Is there something going on that makes it hard for you to be on time?”

For Developmental Purposes

When you notice an employee is struggling with a skill or can't complete a task, constructive feedback can help you get to the root of the issue and find a solution. Perhaps they were never properly trained, or they feel afraid to ask for help. Feedback can help you tackle the situation together and improve.

• Sample script: “How are you feeling about creating that quarterly report? I am highly motivated to make you successful with it. What can I do to ensure you have everything you need?”

To Manage Workload

Sometimes, a team member's workload isn't realistic, or they feel strained and unsupported. Before the situation reaches levels of burnout, take time for a feedback conversation with them; many people who feel burned out don't know how to bring it up. Then you list steps to help them reset and move forward.

• Sample script: “How are you feeling about your workload lately? Does it seem manageable to you, or do you feel like you're being spread too thin?”

These conversations can be difficult. But the alternative to clear communication is always worse. Kim Scott, an advisor to Dropbox, Twitter, and other top Silicon Valley firms, has an example she uses to support what she calls Radical Candor.⁸ She famously talks about an employee named “Bob.” He was, she recalls, charming and funny and personable – an enjoyable employee to have around. There was just one problem: his work wasn't any good. “His work just absolutely sucked,” she told me once. But rather than give him constructive feedback or put him on a performance improvement plan, she said, she gave what she called “head-fake praise.” “This is a great start,” she remembered telling him. When it became clear, after nearly a year of this, that his performance wasn't improving, she realized that she was going to lose other team members if she did not let Bob go. “I sat down and had a conversation that I should have had with Bob months ago,” she told me. After describing his sub-par performance, she recalled, Bob stood up: “Why didn't you tell me?” he asked her.

“I realized in that moment that I had failed Bob,” she told me. Not only did she fail to provide feedback to Bob about his performance, but she hadn't allowed him to communicate regular feedback to her about any support she may have needed. Moreover, the work environment was apparently such that Bob's colleagues never brought up his sub-par performance.

This is an extreme example, perhaps, but it illustrates the importance of a strong feedback culture. When open communication is encouraged, fostered, and maintained, successes can be reinforced, and shortcomings can be met head-on. Problems that otherwise would have been allowed to fester, like the pitcher who just can't seem to get anybody out, can be addressed as they arise. And whether things are going well or need some improvement, reviews won't take employees by surprise.

Key Points

• Performance feedback should not come as a surprise – it should be consistent, continuous, and free-flowing.
• Goals make an excellent foundation for setting expectations, giving feedback, and measuring performance.
• A healthy feedback culture involves routine communication, employee-driven one-on-one meetings, and performance reviews.
• Positive feedback goes a long way to retaining top performers and motivating employees to do amazing work.
• When it's time for tough conversations, however, honest, open communication is crucial.