When you are first setting up your review process, one of the first questions you’ll run into is what schedule to run them on. There’s 2 ways:
Scheduled around a common date, so that everyone has their reviews in the same period
Scheduled on the anniversary of people’s start date, so that everyone has their reviews at different times
For the more frequent performance/development type of reviews, we chose to support the first case - common date review cycles because we believe this better supports a culture that focuses on growth and development.
We chose to support common date reviews because they:
Help shift the focus from performance management to continuous development
We believe people should receive formal feedback continuously throughout the year, not just once at the end of the year. Anniversary based reviews fall into the danger of being the only time that managers check in with their team about their development. It's easy to set up periodic check ins for everyone when you do them all at once.
Ensure everyone’s experience is fair & consistent
Throughout the course of a year, many things are in flux from company mission and business objectives to budgets. When reviews happen all at once, everyone is getting evaluated based on the same criteria or circumstances.
Separate reviews from the expectation of a salary increase
Reviews that are tied to people’s anniversaries usually come with the unspoken expectation of a salary increase. When this doesn’t happen, not only is the employee probably left feeling a bit dissatisfied but the review conversation is as meaningful as it should have been!
Decrease the workload for HR admins
Common date reviews require less monitoring time from admins because they all happen at a set time instead of continuously throughout the year.
When reviews are done all at once, it also makes it easier for admins to pull out common trends and spot training opportunities.
As you learn more about what works for your team, it's inevitable that your review process will need to be updated at some point. It’ll be a lot easier to make changes to the forms or process with common date reviews because there’s a natural gap where no reviews are happening.
Increase completion rates
People are more likely to complete their reviews on time when there is a collective push from the company to get the process completed
We know there are other less frequent reviews, like Probation Reviews, that need to be scheduled based on people’s start dates. We’re currently trying to understand more about how people run these so we can make this easier to do in Charlie. If you’ve got some thoughts do let us know!
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