Purpose: To promote face-to-face conversations between supervisors and employees throughout the year on a regular, as needed basis. In these conversations, the supervisor seeks out the employee's point of view, while sharing his or her own feedback. These discussions should focus on the four basic needs of employees. The online form will walk you through these four needs:
1. What do you want me to do? How do you want me to do it? Define what success looks like:
- Developing a clear understanding of what is expected of the employee on a day to day basis: providing a clear job description
- Developing clear goals, projects and initiatives that are to be completed by the employee that are specific to a given period of time
- Performance Style. How a person completes their work: teamwork, relationships, how they work with and interact with other people
2. What do I do well? Clearly communicating and praising the employee for what he or she does well, both in the work that gets done and in the demonstrated behavior of how it gets done.
3. What do I need to develop or improve? What do I want and/or need by way of growth and development? Also, clearly communicating with me what I could do better, both in the work that gets done and in the demonstrated behavior of how it gets done.
4. What do I need from my supervisor to do my job better? What can my supervisor do to better support, guide, or provide resources for me that would help me in performing my job? This provides the opportunity for this to truly become a two-way conversation, talking about how things could be improved to make work go better.
Documentation and Conversation Frequency. At a minimum, the process should involve a documented conversation at the start of the fiscal year to set expectations, at the middle of the year to check on progress and clarify goals for the rest of the year, and at the end of the year for the wrap up and final comments. You can of course document progress and changes more often than this. While these are recommended minimums for documenting to gain clarity, the goal is to use the outline of the process for frequent, ongoing and regular conversations between supervisors and employees throughout the year. Note: The only review that is submitted to HR is the final end of the year review.
Final 1:1. It is expected that the supervisor and employee will have a face-to-face conversation over the final year-end review before it is sent to HR.
Note about reviewing authorities: It is expected that the Reviewing Authority (supervisor's supervisor) will be consulted on final reviews that may show exceptionally high assessments or that show the employee is performing below expectations before discussing it with the employee and submitting it to HR. The Reviewing Authority maintains full access to any review in their line of authority at any time during the year, so submitting a review to them is unnecessary.