Performance review season is coming: Is your process missing these basics?

Performance review season can be stressful, especially when there’s a lack of clarity around how, exactly, employees are being evaluated. At least, that’s what Barbra Gago has observed over the course of her career.

“No one ever really knew what they were supposed to be evaluated on, if they were even doing the right stuff half the time,” she said of performance management during her tenure at Greenhouse in a recent episode of HR Brew’s People Person podcast.

So then, it’s perhaps unsurprising that, in 2020, Gago founded career progression platform Pando. Since then, the CEO has raised $6.9 million from Craft Ventures, among others, to bring more transparency to the review process at employer clients including Notion and Oyster.

Gago discussed performance review missteps and missed opportunities with Kate Noel, SVP and head of people operations at Morning Brew.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your very first performance review? Was it memorable, traumatic, hilarious?

Strangely enough, I feel like I haven’t had very many performance reviews myself. I think it’s common that many individuals go through their entire career either not even having performance reviews or the conversations…My first performance review, I guess officially, was giving a performance review, not getting one.

So what gap in HR or performance management made you launch Pando?

I was the CMO at Greenhouse before joining a company called Miro and then founding Pando. And I noticed that at Greenhouse we really operationalized the recruiting process and made it feel almost like a sale and marketing funnel, which resonated very much with me. And then I had the insight that we kind of hired people and then threw them over the fence, and at some point we’re like, “Okay, we’re going to evaluate your performance now”...at a high level, the things that have been missing are just very basic, clear foundations. What are the levels? What are the expectations of different levels, career frameworks, performance frameworks? And then I would say more recently, and a little bit more advanced, is getting to a more continuous calibration…the last thing that’s been missing is really employee-centric design…What is the process actually doing for everybody?

What would you say is a common first misstep when rolling out performance reviews within an organization?

I think a misstep would be just jumping in and doing it the way that some executive or CEO says to do it because that’s how they did it before…What’s the purpose of this review? Is it for development? Is it for promotions? Is it to understand pay or performance alignment? I think thinking like a product manager is a way to avoid some common pitfalls of just going blindly into the process…And not building the foundations before jumping in…rather than spending all of this time after a performance review to calibrate whether or not managers assess people correctly, the more that you can do of that stuff upfront, the faster the process will be, the more aligned everyone will be, and the less work you have to do at the end to double check everybody’s work.

From a timing perspective, is this something I should do two weeks ahead of a performance review, or two months?

The sooner you can do it, the better. But if you’re planning a performance review and you want to introduce levels, then giving some time for people to get acclimated with it would be good. And also probably setting the expectation that, “Hey, we’re introducing this. It’s a living, breathing thing, so if the organization, it’s going to grow, it’s going to evolve, but we want to be able to level set everybody.” So here’s the levels, and maybe having a little lightweight feedback or development conversations anchoring people in that before you do a full review.

What is something that you wish more HR leaders would bear in mind when it comes to performance management?

As much as possible, if we can flip the paradigm of performance management from something that’s backward looking to something that’s more forward looking. So a lot of times we don’t do the work of defining the levels and being clear about those and defining competencies for roles and how those map to levels…We don’t do that work because it feels hard or it feels like it will be stale soon or employees are just going use this as check boxes, and as soon as they do that, they’re going to want a promotion. And I think that’s a big misconception because most of the time what we find is that when employees have that clarity, they are much more realistic about their current abilities and how they’re doing and how they’re performing…Giving people clarity around that is the easiest path, I think, to getting the most people at your organization.

For more from this conversation, tune into the People Person podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, or watch it below.