How WeThrive prevents performance review mistakes – 3

Piers Bishop · October 30, 2013

Number 3 in that Forbes list of performance review mistakes is the recency effect.  Last in, first out, in other words.  We humans tend to let the most recent event, especially if it’s a bad one, dominate our view of the whole year. So a recent mistake ends up being the entire topic of your performance review, even if you’ve done a great job the rest of the time.

In fact our attention is more and more focussed on current events, as Twitter and Co. make our minds smaller. So what’s a manager to do in order to get a balanced view on the events and progress of the whole year, while looking ahead and setting goals that will make the next year work better? Well, we can help.

WeThrive takes a complete look at the working lives of your team, easily and quickly, does some maths and returns you a set of goals you can paste into your annual review process or use in continuing personal development discussions.  It cannot be distracted by the recency effect – the goals it returns are a reflection of the difficulties your people face, not people’s memories of recent events.

You can decide how often to use the tool – once you decide to buy WeThrive you can use it as many times as you need it, so the data you have is as recent as you need. Plus, as your team get used to the idea that their everyday problems can be reframed as development opportunities, and as they become more aware of the unconscious roadblocks to intelligent performance, so they will become more able to self-manage their development, making your job easier.

Why not check out our dashboard and reports, and imagine having goals derived from real needs at the centre of your annual reviews and appraisals. No head-scratching, no agonising over whether a is more important than b – WeThrive does the work and you get to be the person who helps make things work better.

Look in our resources section for tip sheets on no-blame conversations, a teaching framework that will help your staff ‘get’ what you need them to know, and a free template for performance reviews that make working life better by turning an annual headache into mechanism for ongoing personal development.

If you find these free resources useful why not try WeThrive, free of charge, and make performance review mistakes a thing of the past.