Imagine you’ve been asked to help people do their best work.
You want them to understand what’s expected of them, see how their contribution matters, get useful feedback and have opportunities to develop. You also want managers to recognise good work, address problems and support people through change.
Where would you start?
Would you begin with a form? A rating scale? A conversation scheduled several months from now? Or would you start by finding out what helps people perform well, what gets in their way and what support they need?
It’s a question worth asking, particularly when the brief is to “refresh performance management”. Before we improve the process we already have, how clear are we about what it needs to achieve?
What are we trying to make better?
At People Lab, we’ve supported organisations including AWE, adidas, BAE, World Gold Council and WWF on performance-related work. It’s a topic that brings together some big questions about work: expectations, contribution, relationships, development and fairness.
It can also become a very procedural conversation.
How often should reviews happen? Should we use ratings? What should the form include? How do we get managers to complete it?
Those decisions matter. But they’re difficult to make well without first answering a more fundamental question: what needs to be different for the people using this?
Perhaps employees are working hard but don’t know which priorities matter most. Perhaps managers avoid difficult conversations until a problem has grown. Perhaps development is discussed enthusiastically, then disappears under the pressure of everyday work.
Each of these calls for a different response. A redesigned review form might help with some aspects. Others will require changes to how work is organised, how managers are supported or what happens between formal conversations.
“Improve performance management” is a starting point for inquiry. There’s more to understand before it becomes a useful design brief.
Look at the experience between the reviews
An annual review is one moment in a much longer experience.
What happens when someone starts a new piece of work? When priorities change? When they do something well? When they’re struggling? When they ask for an opportunity to develop?
These moments help us understand whether people are getting what they need.
Someone might have a thorough annual review but spend much of the year unsure whether they’re focusing on the right things. A manager might complete every required check-in while an employee still feels unable to raise a concern.
That’s why completion rates can only tell us part of the story. They show whether an activity happened. We need to look more closely to understand whether it helped.
Was the conversation useful? Did it create clarity? Did someone leave with support they could act on? Were commitments followed through?
If we want to improve performance development, these are useful things to investigate.
More frequent conversations still need to be useful
Moving from an annual review to regular check-ins can create more opportunities for feedback and support. But changing the frequency leaves plenty of other design questions unanswered.
Do managers know how to give feedback that someone can use? Can employees talk honestly about what’s making work difficult? Is there time to explore development properly? What can either person do about the issues raised?
A calendar invitation creates space for a conversation. The quality and consequences of that conversation need attention too.
This means looking beyond manager training alone. Confidence and skill matter, alongside workload, competing expectations, access to support and the example set by leaders.
We can ask managers to have thoughtful development conversations. We also need to understand whether the conditions around them make that realistic.
Design with the people who will use it
This is where People First by design becomes practical.
Before deciding what a new approach should look like, spend time with employees and managers. Explore recent experiences rather than relying only on their views of the current system.
Ask about a conversation that helped them move forward. What made it useful? Ask about a time they needed feedback or support and didn’t get it. What happened? Explore what makes these conversations easier or harder in the reality of their working week.
Then involve people in developing and testing possible improvements.
That might mean trying a simpler way to agree priorities, experimenting with a different conversation structure or finding a more useful way to follow through on development commitments.
The aim is to learn whether a change helps before building an entire process around it.
Different roles may need different arrangements. A useful approach needs enough consistency to support fairness, alongside room for the realities of different kinds of work.
Keep the purpose in view
There are legitimate reasons for formal performance processes. Organisations need to make decisions about progression, pay and accountability, and people deserve clarity about how those decisions are made.
The question is how those requirements sit alongside the everyday support people need to perform and develop. We should examine what each part of the approach is for, and whether it serves that purpose well.
If we were designing performance management today, we might retain an annual review. We might change its role considerably. We might develop something different.
Starting with people’s experiences gives us a better basis for making those choices.
In the opening post in this series, we asked what we would do differently if we were designing people practices today, knowing what we now know.
Performance is a good place to put that question to work.
Before your next refresh, ask employees and managers what currently helps them do good work…and where they need something better.
What would you design if that was your starting point?
What if your next performance management refresh started with people, rather than process?
We help organisations rethink and redesign the moments that matter at work, using employee insight and human-centred design to create better experiences and outcomes.
Let’s talk about what that could look like for your organisation.
