Do Your Performance Reviews Include This Critical Item?

Performance reviews are a necessity in businesses of any size; without a performance review, businesses have no way to define if they’re succeeding as a company and if their employees are contributing to that success. Without that data, it’s impossible to make effective changes and improvements.  

 Some companies conduct reviews annually, and others participate in more regular feedback cycles to help continually align on expectations and optimize performance, but by and large, employee performance reviews focus on a few key issues. Usually this is done by reviewing a list of agreed-upon goals and going through the list to see if the previously defined objectives were met. Sometimes these goals are extremely measurable, such as delivering a set number of reports at the onset of every month. Other goals are more subjective, like “support” or “assistance” on projects.  

The Missing Piece

One of the things that most businesses miss, however, doesn’t have a lot to do with how their reviews are timed or what goals they choose to assign and assess. Most companies don’t include a skill analysis in their performance reviews. Employee skills are the very thing that supports the ability to meet objectives, and too many employers don’t ask why their employees aren’t achieving goals; or if they are asking, they might not be sure how to gauge skills or what methods to use to improve them.  

The Importance of Ongoing Skills Analysis  

  • It allows you to quantify what’s driving performance. A lack of technical training might be what prevents your employees from meeting their targets. This is an easy training that can be done cost-effectively. It’s essential to ask the questions about why employees are performing the way they are and be prepared to make changes that best serve the business and most wisely use its resources. An employee underperforming because they lack a teachable skill is different than one whose performance suffers because of bad management. Both problems affect the success of the business, but it’s important to know why to address it successfully.  
  • It helps you promote from within. Organizations can save a significant amount of time and money on hiring, onboarding and training when they look for skills that already exist within the company to fill the roles and responsibilities of open positions. A skills analysis is a valuable ongoing metric to assess because it can help you identify early on who the natural replacements or promotions might be with some additional time and investment.  

Find Highly Skilled Talent With Open Systems 

If you’re looking to add the best talent to your team, we can help. Our recruiters know how to identify the skills and talent in a candidate so we can match them to the right job every time. Get in touch with our technical staffing experts today.  

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