Do your performance reviews leave your team feeling more frustrated than motivated? A well-executed performance review calibration could solve that for you.
If you’ve got more than a couple of years of experience under your belt, you already know that the key to any successful meeting, performance review calibration being no exception, is making sure that
- Everyone knows what is expected of them before the meeting
- Everyone comes prepared accordingly
To learn more about what steps you can take before, during, and after a performance calibration meeting, read our comprehensive guide to performance calibration meetings.
Let's dive into how you can leverage these meetings to enhance your review process.
First things first: Before getting into any calibration-related stuff, you need to make sure that your team members have completed their performance review process.
Full disclosure: We will be using screens from our product Mesh to demonstrate how you can easily streamline your performance review and calibration process.
Keeping it as simple as possible, Mesh brings together all your review-related data in one place.
Under the "Company" tab on the left navigation pane, start off by selecting "Reviews" and then select the current review cycle at the top of the screen. Get a visual recap of your Company's performance through previous cycles on the talent grid and line chart to establish context from previous cycles.
The timeline below the grid acts as a visual cue and reminder so you don’t miss any review-related deadlines.
Under that, you can see each of your team members listed along with their review status and other metrics (like promotion status or overall rating) you can customize as you wish, depending on what you'd like to focus on. This gives you a high-level glimpse at each individual's performance record.
So, before you head to the actual calibration meeting, you can ensure that your team’s reviews are complete and that data is consistent across reviewers. You can also access this information for your skip team, if applicable. Once this is done, make sure to sit with your team’s previous performance review data before heading into the performance review calibration meeting.
Take a closer look at how your team members have performed through previous goal cycles and access previous review forms and feedback they have received to go into the calibration meeting prepared with concrete data points rather than relying on your memory (which may be prone to bias – hey, we are all human).
You can also access this for the company at large, with additional graphic representations like Sankey charts, which capture people’s movement through different performance buckets to help identify where your attention would be required.
Your performance review calibration meeting agenda
Now that you’re in the actual meeting, how do you start?
1. Start with a discussion
Ensure that everyone is clear on the calibration process's expectations and goals, and discuss common biases to set the stage. ahigh-level discussion of ratings and performance company-wide and team-wide before getting into specific cases.
With Mesh’s data-backed insights, you can access real-time dashboards, which can help you see your organization’s performance data in a new light. You can access this under the “Company” tab by clicking on “Reviews", and then “Insights”.
These dashboards help you answer questions such as which functions are performing the best, which of your geographical centers is outperforming the other, and whether new employees have better track records than older ones.
2. Review ratings
Review the manager ratings for their team members. This involves reviewing each employee's rating and comparing them to others in the organization. It's essential to have a clear understanding of the performance criteria being used to make the ratings.
Respecting the sanctity of everyone’s time, discuss only the previously flagged cases in depth. There’s not much sense in using a company-wide meeting to discuss why a consistently high-performing person continues to perform well and deserves a promotion. Shift the focus instead to cases where the delta between different sources of data is the highest.
3. Discuss reasons
Discuss the reasons for the discrepancies and reach a consensus on how to address them. This involves digging deeper into each employee's performance and looking for explanations. Identifying the root causes of any discrepancies is essential to ensure that they are addressed appropriately.
Make sure that the conversation is rooted in data and evidence rather than “gut feelings” and other subjective grounds for evaluation. This is the opportunity to align everyone on the yardstick for performance and ensure that criteria are being applied in a fair and consistent manner. This is also the best time to surface blind spots and call out biases in judgment and, similarly, be open to others pointing out any errors in your judgment.
4. Adjust and recalibrate ratings
Adjust the ratings as necessary to ensure consistency across the organization. This means adjusting the performance ratings of some employees to ensure that they are consistent with the ratings of others in similar roles. You can do this by clicking on the team member’s name whose rating you wish to recalibrate, and within the drop-down menu next to “View Review Summary”, you get the option to recalibrate their rating and record the reasons for the same.
Make the relevant changes, record the reasons that came up in the calibration meeting, and then save the form. If you wish, you can even re-open the manager review form to change your comments in your team member’s review form.
In case there are multiple changes to be made, you can also use Mesh’s revamped calibrations feature. Go to Company > Reviews and choose "Year End Calibration 2024" to access all your calibration history across previous performance cycles in one place. You can choose to customize the visible columns to compare performance across cycles and get an in-depth idea of the calibration history for everyone’s benefit.
5. Decide on next steps
Once all relevant cases have been discussed and all ratings are adjusted accordingly, you can now decide on the next steps for each person – this might look like promoting someone, putting another person on a PIP, and assigning team rotation stints to another individual.
After the meeting, you should populate your team members’ IDPs and set up 1:1s with them to explain their ratings once the reviews are published company-wide. For more information on what to do before, during and after your performance review calibrations, read our best tips and tricks for performance review calibrations article.
If you followed these steps to the end – congratulations, you’re officially done with the most arduous part of the performance review process. We understand that these processes can get complicated with distributed teams, and that’s why we have made it our mission to simplify and streamline performance enablement through our intuitive user interface and timely nudges to propel you to have the right conversations at the right time, to get the most out of your people. Click here to learn more about Mesh by setting up a demo call.
