7 Effective Benefits of Employee Led Reviews

Evaluating a year’s worth of work for each employee can be a hefty task, and one that takes up a lot of time. If an employee doesn’t share their true feelings in their review, how are you to know their true goals and career aspirations?

Research reveals 37% of employees think the review process is outdated, and a further 42% said they think managers leave important elements out of their review due to bias. Matt Hulett, chief product officer of TINYpulse, the company behind the research, said:

With such dissatisfaction surrounding the traditional annual review method, more companies are introducing employee led reviews, which allows employees to take more control of their review. From a manager’s perspective, this may seem like dangerous territory, as employees can feel more empowered and refuse any feedback. This has the potential to cause disruption to business productivity.

However, employee led reviews can actually make workers happier, improving their productivity, and creating a closer relationship between themselves and managers. Read on to find out more about the benefits of adopting employee led reviews.

Learn more about your employee’s career goals

Employee led reviews ask the employee to evaluate their career goals and express these to their managers, which means you can gain a better insight in what your employee wants out of their career and what makes them happy. You can then come away from the review and adapt to their wants and needs.

Perhaps one of your employees wants to progress within their role and within the business, but didn’t feel comfortable to ask, or because there was a lack of evidence to support their progression, you didn’t feel they could excel in another role. However, with an employee led review, they are encouraged to keep track of their progression regularly and record the work they have done throughout the year.

Encourages a culture of open communication

Communication is an important element of any workplace, and by using employee led reviews, communication can be improved greatly between employees and managers. Often, managers don’t interact with employees every day, which can affect how much someone gets out of their annual review. Performance data is usually processed by an outsider such as someone of the HR team or at the level or two above the employee’s manager, but when employees are asked to process this data themselves and discuss it with their team manager, they can feel more connected with them.

Employees are responsible for making this interaction and build a relationship with their manager, which means they will also communicate more with those who are involved in their career progression and those who are part of the review process.

Business development points emerge

When an employee has the opportunity to take more control of their annual review, they may be more likely to express individual ideas about how the company can be improved that they might not have felt comfortable to express before. As you are asking your employees to evaluate their own role within the business, rather than you evaluating it for them, they will be more interested in improving their place of work and their role within this.

Identify areas of growth easier

Whilst employee led reviews allow employees to discuss important projects they’ve completed, the skills they have acquired and the great work they have produced, employees can fail to identify areas where they could do with some improvement. When an employee assesses their work themselves, they identify the areas they want to improve on, which means they review can be a more positive and memorable experience for them.

Employee empowerment

Companies using traditional performance review methods often ask employees to rate themselves on a scale of one to five to determine how well they are doing in their current role. However, many of these companies warn that employees should never rate themselves as above a three. But how are employees meant to feel empowered if they will never be above average? Adopting an employee led review puts an end to this system and encourages employees to develop, rather than make them feel unmotivated.

Focus on the positive

Often performance reviews focus on the negative and what employees are doing wrong, which again leaves them with a negative experience that will only encourage a block in work productivity. Employee led reviews focus more on what the employee is doing right rather than what’s going wrong. It demonstrates what the employee is capable of and what they are proud of. It creates a more honest environment for employees and identifies where they can improve, boosting their morale within the business.

It’s quicker

Allowing your employees to self-assess their performance means they must write down their achievements throughout the year and provide additional evidence. However, there are so many online self-assessment services that can be used within a company that are accessible and easy to use, making it easier to record what projects employees have worked on throughout the year and gives a more accurate picture of an employee’s performance.

With traditional methods of performance reviews increasingly thought of as biased, unfair and consistently negative, employee led reviews seem a much better solution to boost employee confidence and work ethic.