How to effectively write about a team member's impact?
End of cycle review requires managers to spend quality time reviewing the overall performance of their team members. Managers are expected summarise team members' impact or contribution, strengths, growth areas and future experiences.
Impact or contribution is a set of 3 to 5 significant contributions that the employee has made during the previous performance review cycle.
A few guidelines for managers on how to articulate a team member's impact are:
- BAT rule - Behaviours, Achievements, Targets are the basis for writing any performance summary. For example, "the employee displayed strong commitment in closing a large deal and achieved 100% sales quota". In this example, commitment, closing a large deal and 100% sales quote follow the BAT rule.
- Move the needle - A performance summary describing the impact by an employee should always mention the improvement from the current state, however small it may be. For example, "because of the tool implemented by the employee the turnaround time improved from 2.5 to 2 days"
- Data support - Data makes the impact credible. Any impact by an employee during the performance cycle should be supported with data like emails, chats, documents, presentations, activities recorded in any internal tool.
- Peer validation - Managers should collect feedback from the colleagues with which the employee has collaborated in his or achievements. A validation by peers lends credibility to the impact summary.
