Breeze through your work performance review

    There’s no need to break out in a cold sweat just because it’s time for yur boss to review you work. follow our strategies and career ahead at every work assessment.

“Performance review” – every three months, six months or year when you hear those words whispered around the office you feel sick to the stomach at the prospect of sitting down with your boss for an hour to discuss your work performance.

     What if your boss thinks you’re under-performing? what if you have a panic attack and can’t string a sentence together? What if you get a rap over the knuckles for all the personal calls, emails and chats you engage in on work time? It’s enough to keep a girl awake at night – and it does. Trouble is – if you keep looking at your performance review (PR) as a test, you’ll only increase your anxiety about the event. a better approach is to view it as a great vehicle to help you get ahead in your career.

     ”If PRs are conducted properly, they are a sensational opportunity for you to enhance your career development,” “They offer an objective and structured approach to measuring your impact in your job. Because they highlight your personal and professional growth, they can also become credentials, which, when added to your resume, help substantiate your job performance if you apply for another position or a promotion.

What’s the point?

There are four main functions of a job performance review:

• To look at your work performance to date.
• To rate your qualities, such as communication and problem-solving skills, initiative and innovation, time managemetn and leadership potential.
• To plan ahead and set objectives and targets designed to stretch your capabilites during the next review period.
• To identify which skills you lack and consider any additional training, job rotation, coaching or mentoring you need to better achieve your work goals.

     “Performance appraisals provide bosses with a vehicle to reward individual performance and keep thier employees posted on how they fit into the big picture of an organisation, so they feel motivated, important and visible,” “The process is two-way. It’s not about a manager dictating the review. Staff memebers have an equal responsibility to self-assess their performance and bring along a portfolio which itemises what they believe their achievements have been for the year.”

     “During a PR meeting or several days after it, a written assessment will be handed to you. To prove that you agree with your boss on the contents of your PR report, you both have to sign off on the review. In  some companies, the assessment doesn’t go any further. In others, it goes to the next person in charge. Either way, the information is supposed to be kept strictly confidential.

     Though PRs may be linked to a salary hike, they should never become a substitute for the dismissal process, which involves a totally separate procedure. “A performance review should never be full of surprises,” “During the meeting you should only hear criticisms you have been alerted to n the previous year. If not, you’re well withing your rights to say to your boss, ‘I would have appreciated it if you could have flagged these problems with me at the time that they arose’.”

     In her former position as an account manger for a large advertising agency, Kathy, 26, had annual performance appraisals for four years. “During each meeting, we looked at hte previous year’s objectives and the degree to which I had met them. Occasionally, I received constructive criticism. Once my manager pointed out that sometimes I made off-the -cuff remarkes to some of the creative team which had made a few people unhappy or upset. She suggested I get into the habit of counting to 10 and thinking my words through before I made critical comments. When I started to implement that technique my communication skills greatly improved and so did my relationships with my co-workers.” 

Face-to-face with your boss

“I’m a hard worker, but I resent my six-monthly performance review because I feel it’s just an added pressure in an already pressured job,” says Jen, a 28 year old sales rep. “My manager sees it more as an opportunity to catalogue his complaints than engage in discussion so he rarely has a positive thing to say. I feel embarrassed and inept, like he’s a teacher giving me a bad report card.”

     If your boss rates your performance lower than you think yor deserve during your PR, it can be hard not to go on the defensive. But Fuller suggests you try to consider what’s being said with an open mind. “You can become so obsessed by the fact that you only got a three on ‘meeting deadlines on time’ when you should have got a four, that you don’t actually listen and then miss a golden opportunity to refine and improve some of your skills.”

     “Maybe the criticism is valid. Maybe it’s not the first manager who has suggested this is something you hsould work on. If that’s the case, try to take a positive approach by asking yourself, ‘What can I do to improve?’. If however, you feel that your boss’ criticism is way out of line, you’re going to have to come up with punchy counter arguments. This is only possible if you have thoroughly prepared for your PR -  not only by coming up with a list of how you add value to the company, but by also making a list of ‘comebacks’ to counter any complaints you think your boss might have against you.”      Sometimes jumping in early and presenting your weaknesses or flagging issues that have arisen can take the stress out of a PR by lessening your boss’ need to criticize and making you seem like you’re totally across what’s going on. For example, you might say “I am concerned that I am sometimes a little bit sensitive when a client comes back and says they don’t like a design that I spend hours putting together, but this is the way I am trying to address that issue – by learning not to take things so personally, by reminding myself that I’m here to serve the client and by acknowledging that we just have different perspectives and that what they are saying is not a negative judgment of my work.”   

If you’re having difficulties with a colleague – bring it up only if you have tried to sort the problem out with that co-worker directly – otherwise you will just come across like a tell-tale. 

Toni, 29, works for a company which produces advertising brochures for kids clothing. When she went for his first performance review, her boss used it to air his personal grievances against her. “He was a very emotional person who didn’t handle pressure well and obviously resented the fact that I was more organised that he was,” Toni recall. “So during my PR, he introduced a whole range of complaints that he’d never mentioned before. Even though I argued with his I felt powerless.” At first Toni refused to sign the report, forcing her boss to eventually compromise on some issues. Finally, when she did sign she felt that she’d been coerced into signing off on a report that misrepresented her work.     

  “It can be very difficult to assert that you’re not getting a good work appraisal when your boss has a hidden or personal agenda such as wanting you to not look too good because he’s worried about being shown up by you,” “In that respect an employee can be at a disadvantage during a performance reviews. If you’re an easy-going kind of person, you may to take a less that favorable review on the chin and move on. But if you’re more sensitive, a negative PR can make you feel ineffectual, unliked, paranoid, anxious, resentful or disillusioned so that you feel very demotivated at work.”            

     “Ask the advice of colleagues who are on side. If you have a good relationship with the next person in charge you may want to drop in to their office and have a chat about your fears and concerns. However, if the unspoken rule of the organization is that you don’t go above someone’s head ever, no matter what your problem, you may have no comeback. That’s why it’s so important to try to ensure that you have a good working relationship and high profile with many people in your organization – not just your immediate manger.” One good way of doing this is to network with both clients and co-workers, so that you have a good support base. 

Survival pointers 

It’s D-Day – you barely slept all night worrying about what would be said during your PR and all morning you’ve felt like you’re about to face a firing squad. If your performance review makes you nervous, then in the week before, try using stress management techniques to help calm you down. Every day, do 20 minute relaxation sessions where you tense and relax all your muscles, breathe slowly and rhythmically and visualize yourself walking in to your PR meeting feeling cool, calm and confident.     

   On the day of your performance review, an hour before the meeting close your office door and do a 10-minute relaxation of take a quick walk around the block to clear your head. With 20 minutes to go, call a partner or friend to give you a pep talk so you enter the meeting in a confident frame of mind. And make sure you have organized to have lunch with a friend or sympathetic co-worker after the meeting so you can debrief and talk over how it went.

      In some organizations, PRs are nothing but a rubber-stamp activity. “The company may not follow through even though management has identified a person’s needs for further training,” “Or an employee might want to get a certain project up but need some assistance and their boss may not be forth-coming. This be frustrating and if it happens a few years in a row, you might need to start looking around for a job in a more supportive workplace. But in many cases, despite the butterflies they cause, performance reviews can be a really positive thing – they can give you a chance to clear the air with your boss, clarify what’s expected of you and draw attention to your many achievements and skills – reminding your manager just what good promotion material you are.”

 Doing your PR Prep

So, your manager has set a date for next PR. To prepare, start making a list of all your strengths and also a list of skills you would like to improve and develop. Identify the areas in which you’d like to gain more exposure at work and investigate whethere there is any appropriate training you could do inside or outside the oragnisation.

Ask for a skeleton copy of the review format so you know what to expect and what kind of key areas will be discussed. Find out if the review is linked to training and development of salary increase. Once you know exactly what the company is looking for, make the time to keep a work diary on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Use your diary to record your input and any goals or targets you fulfil.

Think in terms of your achievements and impact. If you have veen involved with clients or colleagues on particular projects, it’s good idea to do a proper evaluation by seeking feedback. If it’s positive, ask those people to put it in writing. Keep this kind of documentation in a separate folder along with lists of ideas, innovations, diagrams and photocopies of industry news articles you would like to discuss with your manager – just to show you’re always thinking about ways to improve.

What about that bugbear you have aobut unreasonable project deadlines or having to do things that are not really part of your job? If in your PR, you plan to discuss work practices that get up your nose, make sure you have thought through several ways to solve the problem so you show you are thinking constructively rather that just trying to “have a go”. Same goes if you’re having difficulties with a colleague – bring it up only if you have tried to sort the problem out with that co-worker directly – otherwise you will just come across like a tell-tale.

Even then, proceed cautiously. Instead of embarking on a character assassination of your colleague, say: “I find it quite challenging working with Dave. Here are some of the different perceptions we have… I have tried approaching nhim but nothing has changed and I feel we still need to improve our working relationship – would you have any suggestions?”