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ASSESSING PERFORMANCE

Creating an Effective PeerReview Systemby Eric Mosley

AUGUST 19, 2015

Employee performance reviews are a hot topic once again. Deloitte and Accenture have

abandoned annual evaluations and rankings, and according to the July/Aug issue of HBR,

it’s time to “blow up” traditional HR. What practices should be instituted instead? Many

people think real-time peer reviews will be a key piece of the puzzle. Why? By providing

instant and continuous recognition of positive behavior, typically via a public social

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platform, they yield more and richer data on employees, offering managers a clearer

picture of a team or company’s strengths and weaknesses and everyone a better sense of 

how they’re performing.

Most programs, including ours, enable and encourage the sharing of praise and

appreciation – immediate acknowledgment that a colleague is doing great work. And, while

this should, of course, be accompanied by constructive, privately delivered criticism,

various studies and articles, including this recent HBR piece, have touted the benefits of 

positive reinforcement. According to the 2015 SHRM/Globoforce Employee Recognition

Survey, such reinforcement can boost retention, productivity, creativity, and business

outcomes.

But how do you create, maintain and support a successful real-time peer review program to

make sure it delivers on its potential? In the 15 years that Globoforce has been helping

companies implement social recognition solutions, we have learned to recommend the

following steps:

Reflect on core values. Ensure that the metrics on which people are recognized are

aligned with your company’s mission. JetBlue, for example, has five core values – safety,

caring, integrity, passion, and fun – so its Lift peer-review program encourages its 18,000

crewmembers to recognize each other for achievement in those areas. Another company

might choose to emphasize fiscal responsibility, collaboration, or innovation. This allows

for detailed tracking and comparison on key strategic objectives by group, team, or

department, as well as across the company.

Embrace new technology. Today’s workforce is multi-generational and global. So pick a

program that is intuitive, easy to use, fun, interactive, engaging, and fully mobile. Peer

reviews shouldn’t feel like work. If they do, you’ll have a hard time getting employees to

embrace the system and use it to its fullest capability. When Intuit was using a stale,

catalog-based program with lengthy delivery times it logged 5,000 recognition awards

per year. But when it moved to a more modern solution that number jumped to more

than 20,000.

Explain and celebrate the launch. Position the program as a change designed to help

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recognize and celebrate employees, and not a new way to monitor or judge them. At The

Hershey Company, the launch of its SMILES peer-review program was accompanied by

posters, badges and luggage tags, an online campaign kick-off, and launch-day events

featuring cupcakes, photo booths, tutorials, and more. This led to 800 recognition

moments in the program’s first week, 14,000 in the first three months, and 40% of all

employees participating within the first 90 days.

Get everyone on board. Managers and leaders need to be early adopters. Active support

from senior executives communicates to staff that the program is worth their time. You

must also make sure that any employee, at any level, feels empowered to

participate. Emphasize that positive, public feedback is universally welcomed. Members

of the executive team should be recognizing even the most entry-level employees and

vice versa. For example, JetBlue’s CEO Robin Hayes has at one point given eachcrewmember in the company a Lift award for reaching certain milestones.

Encourage frequent, timely recognition. Sooner is better when it comes to promoting

desired behavior. When you note good work immediately, the employee feels compelled

to repeat it immediately. If recognition is delayed, the link might be lost and the

company has lost out on better performance and higher engagement in the meantime.

Empower managers to track results. Give managers access to detailed, real-time, easily

actionable reports on recognition activity, correlated to key business goals. For example,

when ConAgra Foods analyzed its peer recognition it found that failure to recognize an

employee’s good performance was a key predictor of attrition. Managers needed to step

up the praise when they saw that key workers weren’t getting enough.

Effective real-time peer-reviews motivate people to perform well every day of the year, not

 just when a quarterly or annual evaluation is approaching. But these programs can’t be

casually instituted. They must be tied to core corporate values, compatible with the latest

technologies, launched and communicated well, used by everyone in a timely fashion, and

relied upon by managers to inform employee development plans.

 Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect the current number of employees in

 JetBlue’s Lift program.

Creating an Effective Peer Review System

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Eric Mosley is CEO and co-founder of Globoforce, a social recognition firm and creator of 

the conference WorkHuman: Unlock the Future of The Human Workplace. .

Related Topics:

EMPLOYEE RETENTION |  GIVING FEEDBACK |  DATA |  TALENT MANAGEMENT |

PERSONNEL POLICIES

This article is about ASSESSING PERFORMANCE

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Anupam Khanuja a month ago

Is this article about peer reviews or recognition?

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