Employee performance reviews get a bad rap. Often they’re too infrequent, managers ask the wrong questions, or they’re the only tool an employer uses to communicate with employees.
In our latest release, Kin’s performance review builder and templates, we put the power of improving employee feedback in your workplace back into your hands.
We’ve designed a better review page itself; a review template builder; and a variety of templates from which you can get started.
As for making performance reviews more effective in your organization, Kin’s review management tools (calendaring, scheduling meetings, deploying to the entire company with just a few clicks) are there to help you get the most out of your team in time for 2021.
All of these great new tools come bundled in Kin’s Growth plan, and are ready for you to start using today.
A beautiful, better-focused employee review
Kin’s new employee review page is beautiful – but that’s not the mission of the new design. We redesigned the page to focus on feedback and workflow.
With threaded comments and better presentation of employee profile information, the review experience becomes a more informative one.
Mix and match question types, follow up and feedback
In our latest release, you can add most any type of question to your reviews – from multiple choice to long form to scalar. This added flexibility ensures you’re collecting the quantitative data you need to back up the qualitative feedback you’re giving and getting.
A particularly cool update we’re proud of is the ability to create follow up questions. Follow up questions are a great way to get additional feedback from employees and managers about how the review experience itself went and what next steps will be.
Create your own employee review templates, or use ours
Amongst the biggest requests with performance evaluation tools is the lack of flexibility in what reviewers can ask. With our latest release, you can create your own templates, clone existing ones, or choose from pre-built templates we’ve built in for you to use. The ultimate goal with our template builder is to enable workplaces to customize reviews for THEIR workforce, rather than jamming a one-size-fits-all questionnaire into their employee experience.
Slice and dice based on employee group
Another great feature of Kin’s review tools is you can slice and dice which reviews go to which employees. A performance review for your technology team should probably be different than the one you use for your sales people, right? Kin makes that easy: Create a base template, customize it for each team, and use Kin’s incredibly easy deployment tools to ship those reviews out. Then grab a coffee :)
Examples of how to use Kin performance reviews
Now that you can customize Kin’s employee reviews, here are a few ideas for how to put them to work for your employees:
Monthly check-ins
Feedback should never wait, and one of the biggest problems with annual reviews is just that: by the end of the year, it’s too hard to remember all the good, bad, and uglies that happened the prior 365 days.
Quarterly reviews
Quarterly reviews are used to get a pulse on progress and objectives – what are the short term missions you put employees on each quarter, and how are things going?
Once a year compensation review
Ahh, the annual review but in a good way! We recommend a once-yearly review cycle to take a look back and a look forward. Reflect on objectives met, and what needs work in the new year. Also, it’s a good time to have a candid talk about compensation and any potential opportunity for promotions.
Leadership and company review
If feedback isn’t flowing up, the feedback flowing down probably won’t be effective. That’s because leadership may not have established the proper channel to collect feedback for the leadership and company mission.
At least once a year, we recommend soliciting hard feedback about how leadership, management, and company are doing through the eyes of employees – after all, your people are your most valuable asset. As such their feedback is critical to ensuring you’re doing what’s needed to keep them rowing ahead.
Where are my old reviews?
If you’re wondering what happens to your existing reviews, the answer is simple: nothing. They’re still there, and any in-flight reviews will continue to work as you’d expect them to. In addition, the old format of Kin’s employee reviews will live on as a review template so you can always choose to continue using it if it suits your team well.
Keep on communicating
As we dig into the final few months of a (let’s be honest) very unique year, keep in mind your team members could use a little extra communication and feedback. We’re happy to get these great new tools in your hands in time to do just that – round out the year giving your team what it needs to launch into a strong 2021. If you have questions about Kin’s employee performance reviews or the review builder and templates, please reach out to us, we’ll be happy to help. Happy communicating!