It’s becoming more evident that traditional performance reviews aren’t as effective as they once were. Today’s workers have different values than their predecessors. Construction professionals want more than just a paycheck. They also want professional advancement, flexibility, continuing education, and opportunities to make a difference in the world around them. As construction recruiters, we also see that the way employees are given feedback can sometimes be ineffective. Here are some reasons why you should forget traditional performance reviews if you want to land and retain the best talent for your construction jobs.

Based on Your Opinion

During a performance review, you are basically sharing your opinion about your employees unless you have gathered and documented specific examples throughout the year regarding the contributions of each of your employees. And even if you have, sharing those documented instances can cause your employees to get defensive and feel like they are under attack when their contributions are viewed as unfavorable. The fallout can be very disruptive to workplace harmony in the weeks that follow a performance review. It’s time to leave the blame and shame method in the past and prove that you are on the same team as your employees. Find ways to regularly share positive feedback with your team so that a balance is struck between encouragement and constructive criticism.

Create Unnecessary Anxiety

Employees keep the date of their upcoming reviews in the back of their minds. You can feel the tension in the air as these dates gets closer because your employees will become apprehensive about the potential of either being promoted or demoted. Another downfall of annual reviews is that they are almost always delayed, further distracting your employees from their work. If you really want to foster long-term growth and trust, then provide members of your team with several small doses of feedback versus the all-in-one session.

Ineffective and Inefficient

Imagine being the coach of a team of elite athletes, regardless of the sport, you need to provide them with feedback before, during and after the game to ensure their best performance. There are a number of tools that we now have at our disposal that were not available in the past. You can encourage your employees to use online apps like Snapshot to request regular assessments on a variety of key skills including business acumen, global acumen, technical capability, leadership skills and relationships. TINYpulse Perform is another up-and-coming tool that enables construction estimators to share their goals with you and even rate their performances on specific projects.

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