Let’s be honest, no one likes annual performance reviews, whether you’re the one receiving them or giving them. Performance reviews are very necessary for the HR department, however. It’s always a good idea to have documentation regarding an employee’s work should you have to provide that documentation in a legal tight spot. Performance reviews take a lot of time and paperwork, even for smaller companies, and this can cause a lot of headaches for HR professionals. Some companies have found success by utilizing bimonthly reviews. Here are some benefits of switching to a bimonthly review system.
Bimonthly reviews offer one huge advantage over annual performance reviews, where every single person in the company is evaluated at the same time. This turns the review period into a rush to get all the paperwork done instead of a time where sincere effort is given to becoming a better company. The ultimate goal of the HR department is to keep everyone on task and growing consistently but this can’t really happen if you can only focus on filling out forms and filing everything away. By spreading your performance reviews out throughout the year, you also spread out the paperwork, making it much easier to manage and allowing HR professionals to really focus on the important part of the review.
One thing that can be useful when it comes to bimonthly performance reviews is for the HR department to take a step back and let the manager have a little more control. Different departments require different skills and many times the manager understands what those skills are and how they should look in the workplace. That’s not to say that HR professionals should be taken out of the performance review entirely. Striking a healthy balance between HR and management will be great for bimonthly reviews because it ensures that the right people are doing the right part, making for a truly beneficial review.
Another benefit of the bimonthly review system is that it encourages goals and growth that can be tracked. Knowing that they are being evaluated twice a month keeps employees, managers, and HR professionals on their toes. These scheduled reviews allow everyone to know what needs to be worked on, thus creating a goal for next time. At the next review, you can assess how well the employee did with meeting this goal. Tracking progress over a shorter period of time can be much more manageable than trying to evaluate an entire year’s worth of work in one day. Bimonthly reviews also allow the HR department and the management team to offer relevant feedback in a timely manner. It won’t do your employees much good to wait until the end of the year to discuss an issue that happened months ago.
It seems like annual performance reviews have been around forever but it might be time to switch up your review process. It makes sense that giving feedback more frequently can lead to more improvements. If bimonthly seems like a little too much, try monthly reviews or quarterly reviews instead.