How to Conduct a Performance Review in a Difficult Year

Gathering context and showing empathy may be the most difficult parts of a performance review, but they’re also the most important — this year, more than ever.

Even in the best of times, performance reviews can be harmful. In the era of COVID, with team members already contending with external stressors and verging on burnout, a poorly-executed performance review is likely to be even more damaging to your team members’ morale.

With a little extra care, leaders can avoid giving a review that focuses on business goals at the expense of the individual — and hopefully, can take a few additional steps towards boosting their team members’ motivation and well-being.

After working with 1000s of engineering teams on improving performance, we’ve learned a few things about successful end-of-year reviews. We recommend that reviewers:

• Take measures to check assumptions and assume best intentions
• Contextualize the limited information available
• Be specific and focus on coaching opportunities

These strategies will help you give an effective yet compassionate review, and are worth keeping in mind any time you need to give constructive feedback.

Check your biases and assumptions with data

Most managers are aware that they have innate biases that can hamper their ability to fairly and accurately evaluate their team members. But awareness isn’t enough. The most effective way to reduce bias is to check your instincts against objective data.

For example, performance reviews are particularly subject to recency bias. The last few weeks or even months of work loom largest in your memory, which means they are most likely to influence your opinion about your team member’s performance, even if they represent a small sliver of the past year.

If your team member has been writing fewer commits than usual over the last month, you might remember them as writing less code for the entire year, even if that is not the case. Objective data can help you check that bias, as a quick look at your team member’s Commit Volume for the past year can confirm that their current drop in productivity is temporary and not representative of their performance as a whole.

You can use data to check other assumptions as well. Let’s say one of your team members has been taking afternoons off to supervise remote learning or to care for an elderly relative. You might fall prey to negativity bias, a universal bias in which negative impressions — in this case, your team member’s truncated working hours — make a larger impact than positive ones. As a result, you might overlook your team member’s positive contributions to the team and assume that they have been less productive because they’ve been working fewer hours.

But with objective data, you’ll know for sure. You might check their Pull Request Throughput over the last year and find out that, in fact, your team member has been just as productive than usual, if not more, because they’ve been hyper-focused during their limited working hours in an effort to get everything done.

Put everything in context

Of course, data doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s always important to put all quantitative data in context, but it’s particularly important now, when everyone is in need of a little extra compassion and support. With the right context, you can get a more complete picture of your team members’ circumstances, and gain a better understanding of their current needs.

Let’s go back to the example of the team member who has been writing fewer commits than usual over the past month. It might be helpful to use that information to start a conversation and find out why they’ve had a hard time getting into the codebase. You might find out that schools in their area recently shut down, and they’ve been struggling to get into a new routine with the added responsibility of supervising remote learning.

With that information, you can develop a plan to better support that team member, whether it’s temporarily taking some work off their plate or offering them a little time off until they can get their bearings.

On the other hand, your conversation might reveal information that has nothing to do with their personal circumstances at all. For example, you might find out that the team member who has been logging fewer commits has been taking time out of their workday to help with onboarding new team members and improving process documentation.

With that knowledge, you can have a more targeted conversation about your team member’s interests and professional goals. If it turns out your team member prefers working with new developers to writing new code, you might be able to help them reshape their role and find more opportunities for coaching and mentorship.

And don’t forget — positive data needs context too. You might be pleased to find that a team member has been more productive than ever over the past year, with a consistently high Commit Volume and PR Throughput, but it’s still worth having a conversation about why that is and how it’s impacting them. That team member might reveal that they’ve been feeling overwhelmed and insecure due to the current economic and political climate, so they’ve been taking on extra projects and working long hours to ensure their job security.

As their manager, you can use this information to help reassure your team member that their contribution is valued and to help take some of the pressure off. You might even want to discuss their priorities and reallocate certain tasks, so you can help your team member avoid burning out.

Use data to provide specific, actionable feedback

The most effective feedback is specific and actionable. Data can help you focus your conversations on certain aspects of a developer’s workflow, or specific units of work, so you can more effectively coach each individual developer.

For example, let’s say one of the developers on your team is consistently opening large Pull Requests. You could simply encourage them to “open smaller Pull Requests,” but that feedback might not be effective if they’re having trouble finding ways to break down their work. Instead, it can be helpful to identify some of their largest Pull Requests and bring them to your evaluation. That way, you can take a look at some actual Pull Requests together and discuss ways they could be broken down into smaller parts. With concrete examples and a bit of focused coaching, that developer will walk away from your conversation with actionable strategies for opening smaller Pull Requests, and you’ll be more likely to see them achieve the desired result.

In cases where your team members are seriously underperforming to the point where their job really is at risk, it can be helpful to set clear, specific performance expectations. With easy-to-understand targets, that team member may have an easier time doing what they need to do to stay afloat.

Think beyond the annual review

Even if you’re able to run objective, compassionate performance reviews that leave your team members with actionable feedback, annual performance reviews happen too infrequently to maximize their potential for positive impact. It’s not always easy for a team member to speak up and ask for support, and it’s difficult for developers to keep growing when they’re only getting feedback once a year.

If you don’t use them already, consider making regular 1-on-1s part of your management repertoire. With frequent 1-on-1s, you’ll get to know your team members on a more personal level, and with more frequent check-ins, you’ll be able to more effectively support them through difficult situations, whether it’s a personal challenge, like a sick loved one, or a professional one, like a communication breakdown with a fellow team member.

Re-evaluate your evaluation process

If there was ever a year to re-evaluate the way you handle performance evaluations, this is it. While current circumstances may have generated extra pressure to meet business numbers, they have also created extra reason to be compassionate. As a leader, it’s your responsibility to ensure that business pressure doesn’t compromise your team member’s well-being, and to create the best possible circumstances for your team member to do their job.

No matter what you do, some of your team members may be struggling due to circumstances completely beyond either of your control. It may not be the right time for them to boost their productivity or reach the next level of professional success, and that’s ok.