How To Optimise Your Daily Performance Reviews
By Studiowide
Conducting daily performance reviews with your team is a great way to keep everyone focused and aligned with operational goals whilst encouraging professional growth.
It’s important to remember that team managers and supervisors have a responsibility to communicate regularly with their team to understand what’s going on with each individual. This ensures that everyone on the team can concentrate on their operational goals and identify any problem areas.
We know that doing daily reviews the right way can have fantastic benefits for the operation check out our 3 Key Benefits of Effective Daily Performance Reviews.
If, however, you feel as though you’re perhaps not getting the most out of your daily reviews and you want to make them more effective for you and your team, check out our top tips on how to optimise your daily performance reviews!
1. Have your reviews at the same time every day
Having your reviews at the same time every day is a good tactic to make sure you build the habit, which leads to discipline. It also helps the team plan around the daily review. If you do it ad hoc, people are likely to have meeting conflicts or the reviews be forgotten.
Everybody knowing the exact time of day at which the reviews happen will ensure the team doesn’t schedule other meetings at the same time. With that habit being built, team members will know that they have to be prepared to come and do the ‘stand up’ at that given time.
Keep in mind that just because you’re doing these at the same time every day doesn’t mean you have to do them first thing in the morning. Mornings work for some teams but not for all; so freedom to experiment should be encouraged as part of finding a sustainable solution.
2. Make KPI’s Meaningful
Discussing meaningful KPIs in the daily review is a great way to keep everybody focused and to make sure that their tasks are contributing to primary goals. Successfully achieving KPI targets validates the work that teams are doing by letting them know whether they are on the right track or whether a re-think is required around what’s being focused on.
The KPIs you choose for your daily performance review should be driven by a Safety, Quality, Delivery, Cost and People mindset.
However, it’s important to mention that the KPIs we identify at the beginning don’t have to be reviewed forever. You may want to adjust or change some measures, especially if you get feedback from team members that they don’t really feel that it resonates with them or they don’t feel that they can directly impact the number. You may find yourself wanting to experiment and develop a metric that motivates people. Meaningful KPIs should drive the behaviours and the results that you want out of the review process.
3. Have a ‘Standards’ Person for your Daily Review
Having a ‘Standards Person’ is really important in making sure your reviews stay on track, and don’t go off on tangents or get dragged into the weeds.
The Standards Person ensures that the review remains focused and doesn’t devolve into long conversations, because this consumes too much of the team’s time and the effectiveness of the review process is lost.
It’s important to note that very often, people will identify topics that do need to be discussed but don’t require discussion in the review. In this instance, they should make a note to follow up afterwards, take that topic ‘off line’ and circle back to having that discussion with only the people who need to hear it. It is so easy to ask a question and fall into this tangent during the review and it’s the Standards Person’s job to step in and make sure these items are discussed later after the review.
Top Tip – Make sure the Standards Person is not the manager! Very often it’s the manager who gets pulled into the ‘weeds’ and it helps with peer accountability if it’s someone else on the team. Ideally, you should use someone who is very disciplined and organised, someone who isn’t afraid to make themselves accountable or to inject themselves into the conversation when it is going off track. Their position in the organisation is less important than their ability to maintain control.
4. Have an Agenda
Have an agenda or a template for your daily review. When we put the Daily Performance Review in place as part of the Brilliant Basics programme, we always recommend that we start by preparing a list of questions to ask your team. Check out our 4 Most Effective Questions to Ask During Daily Performance Reviews.
5. Find a Balance
Through trial and error, you’ll soon realise it doesn’t work well for everyone to have a daily review. For some teams, it works just as well having it every other day; so feel free to experiment and find what works best for your team. To figure out what is going to work best for your team, it’s important to check in with them as the leader and ask questions to see if this is being effective.
- Are they getting value out of the daily reviews?
- Do they feel things are getting better?
- Are they getting blocked less often?
- Are they getting help when they need it?
Getting these answers will help you know how to tweak the review so your team gets the value that you expect – but be very careful when you start asking the team for their input because you might start getting pushback.
Team members don’t always like having to do daily reviews because they don’t like the visibility that it puts on their daily routines, or maybe they don’t like the accountability of having to drive actions forward, so taking input with a pinch of salt would be recommended. However, generally, teams will enjoy doing the daily review because they will see the benefits to them and how it drives the execution of their activities.
Don’t forget, optimising your daily performance reviews is just one practice part of a bigger mechanism we call ‘Brilliant Basics’.
As part of the ‘Brilliant Basics’ programme, we enable managers, team leaders and colleagues to adopt the essential practices required to achieve world-class levels of safety, quality, delivery, cost and people performance. The practices we teach are interdependent and when done well and done habitually, combine to create this results mechanism. Find out more here.
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