Corporate training day · People
The review that decides something
What gets evaluated, what it is measured against, and what changes afterwards: the whole cycle, not December's form.
- Duration
- 7 hours
- Delivery
- On site · Virtual
- Participants
- From 8 to 20 participants
- Investment
- Request a quote
Investment depends on scope, number of participants and delivery mode. We prepare a proposal at no obligation.
The problem it solves
The annual review arrives at year end as an administrative obligation. The supervisor remembers the last six weeks clearly, fills in the form with high marks to avoid an uncomfortable conversation, and the document is filed without anything changing in the operation.
The form is not the problem. The problem is that nobody agreed in writing, at the start of the period, what doing that job well would look like. Without that prior agreement a review becomes an opinion about a person, and an opinion cannot be discussed with evidence. It gets discussed with feelings.
There is a second failure, quieter than the first. When every supervisor rates by their own yardstick, a four in one department does not mean what a four means in another. The organisation believes it holds comparable data about its people; what it actually holds is several rating styles placed in the same table.
What it covers
The day builds the cycle in the order it happens: the expectations agreed at the start of the period, the follow-up through the year, the calibration between supervisors before anything is communicated, the review conversation, and the decisions that follow from it.
The work is done on the real roles of the organisation in the room. Defining what acceptable performance means in one specific position is harder than filling in a generic competency matrix, and it is what holds the rest of the system up. A full block goes to calibration, the piece that is almost always missing: supervisors comparing real cases until the scale means the same thing to all of them.
The last block is the question that decides whether the system survives. What will the company actually decide with the result? A review cycle that feeds no decision about development, assignment or pay becomes December's form again within two cycles.
What participants learn
- Agree in writing, at the start of the period, what acceptable performance means in each role.
- Separate evaluating the work from evaluating the person.
- Calibrate criteria across supervisors so the scale means the same thing company-wide.
- Run the review conversation on evidence gathered through the period rather than on recent memory.
- Connect the result to concrete decisions about development, assignment or pay.
Agenda
- Expectations written at the start of the period: the agreement everything rests on
- What gets evaluated: results, observable behaviour, and what should stay out
- Rating scales and the pull towards generous scores that avoid conflict
- Calibration between supervisors, worked on real cases
- Recency, likeability and the halo effect in rating
- The review conversation when the person disagrees
- Self-assessment and multi-source input: when they help and when they get in the way
- From result to decision: development, assignment and pay
What the organisation leaves with
- A one-page expectations agreement format for each role.
- A rating scale with observable descriptors written for every level.
- A script for the review conversation, with its sequence and its closing points.
- A cycle calendar with the calibration session scheduled before any result is communicated.
Programme details
- Format
- Corporate training day
- Also available as
- Workshop · Intensive workshop
- Languages
- Español · English
- Includes
- Participant workbook
- Action plan
- Post-training resources
- Facilitation
- ALUD Consulting LLC — Global Business Transformation.
Who it is for
- Owners and directors introducing performance review for the first time
- Companies with a review system nobody takes seriously any more
- Managers and supervisors who evaluate their own teams
- Human Resources leads who administer the cycle
Frequently asked questions
- Do we need to buy software for this?
- No. The cycle runs on spreadsheets and documents for years without trouble. Software helps once there is an agreed criterion; bought before that, all it does is automate a system nobody respects.
- Can we evaluate without the result affecting pay?
- Yes, and many organisations should start that way. Keeping the first cycle apart from the money conversation lets you calibrate the scale before anyone begins negotiating their score. What does not work is promising it will count and then not applying it.
- Is a full day not too much for this?
- It depends what you want to leave with. Half a day is enough to understand the framework; the full day exists because writing descriptors for real roles and calibrating on real cases takes hours of work in the room, and rushing it hands you back the generic form you started with.
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Read more →Request this programme
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