Traditional performance reviews provide an account of an employee’s past activities and results. These reviews do not focus on improvement. As a result, employees do not receive a plan to do better going forward.
Because traditional performance reviews lack guidance for the future, most employees and managers dislike them. Many employees feel these reviews are not relevant to their jobs.
As an HR professional, you may want to reevaluate your performance review. You could consider replacing your review with a professional portfolio.
Find out why you should reevaluate and consider replacing your performance review.
Ineffectiveness of Performance Reviews
A traditional performance review involves many questions, short discussions, and limited feedback. Although this process takes a significant amount of time to complete, it typically has little impact on an employee’s performance.
As a result, many HR professionals are replacing the performance review with a professional portfolio. This portfolio requires each employee to demonstrate their performance by showing their manager what they accomplished during the review period.
Details of a Professional Portfolio
A professional portfolio visually represents an employee’s education, training, certifications, skills, and other job-related information. This portfolio may include work samples, accomplishments, accolades, letters of recommendation, personality type profiles, details about volunteer work, past performance reviews, and other relevant information from the past 6 to 12 months.
A professional portfolio may be presented in physical or digital form. For instance, the portfolio may be included in an employee’s LinkedIn profile or on their professional website.
Benefits of a Professional Portfolio
Replacing the performance review with a professional portfolio helps employees showcase the knowledge, skills, experience, and accomplishments they gained during the last 6 to 12 months. These details demonstrate the employee’s contributions and results from the previous review period.
The information included in a professional portfolio demonstrates the employee’s strengths, weaknesses, and areas that need coaching. These details also help the manager decide whether an employee should receive a bonus, pay increase, or promotion based on the value they provided the organization during the review period.
Structure of a Professional Portfolio
A professional portfolio should include a project or problem the employee faced, the action taken, and the result (PAR). This format helps the manager understand why the employee worked on a task and why it was important.
For instance, an employee who completed the department’s year-end project plan might share the following:
- Project: There were no documented procedures for how our department handled the year-end project. Because the project included multiple elements, it was easy to forget them.
- Action: I proactively created a detailed project plan to document each step of our department’s year-end project.
- Result: The tax and accounting teams said my first year working on the project resulted in the most efficient year-end ever. As a result, the materials I created are being used to train new department employees.
This project demonstrated my ability to do the following:
- Organize large quantities of data
- Produce documents to meet strict deadlines
- Research and verify the changes and requirements
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