Life, eh? You make it through Massive Monday and you’re still manager of xyz widgets, and just when you’d like a bit of a rest here comes the performance review season. So, you go looking for a free performance review template. Surely Google will help?
Well, it certainly gives you a lot of choice – over 23,000,000 results in fact – and even if you restrict it to the specific phrase by putting “free performance review template” in speech marks you still get 53,000.
Without wanting to offend anyone, least of all anyone who provides free performance review templates, I think it has to be said that a template by itself is a pretty useless object. What a manager ideally needs is a thorough understanding of human nature, especially those elements of our nature which are unconscious and are not discussed in our culture – because these will almost certainly be restricting staff and company’s success.
If the manager had that, and was fully equipped to ask the right questions in the right way at the right time, not only would performance review templates become unnecessary but the reviews themselves could happily be abandoned and be replaced by a continuous conversation in which human needs and work routines are negotiated to the benefit of all parties.
But most managers are specialists in their own subjects – expecting them to become expert in human nature as well might be off the mark. They are generally pushed for time (!) as well, and hence the recent trend for HR matters to be outsourced to specialist companies. This is a pity – no-one is better placed than the manager to monitor the progress and problems of an individual employee, and it would be great if they could follow through, diagnose problems and help with practical solutions that enable staff to achieve personal growth and greater productivity.
So we offer what we think is the best solution yet to this difficulty – an integrated suite of tools for the manager who wants to know what is going on in the heads of the team and be able to help them sort out the problems that are found there. In the WeThrive Resources Centre you will find a set of downloadable resources which give you what you need to do just that – background knowledge on the way the human head works – and doesn’t – in a work context, plus skills sheets for developing better ways of talking to the staff in ways that generate useful change. Oh yes – we even include a free performance review template…
Let 2014 be the year when performance reviews get a better rating – they are a rare opportunity to get vital information about how to help staff work better.
