Before You Rate Anyone, Decide What You’re Measuring
I once watched a company with just over 400 employees run a performance cycle on a 1 to 5 scale. The part nobody outside HR ever saw was how much effort and time the calibration truly took.
One full time director spent more than a month on it. Meeting after meeting with leaders: walking through names, defending numbers, adjusting numbers. The most senior HR leader in the company had to sit in on a lot of those sessions. This wasn’t a side project. It was most of two people’s jobs for a quarter.
And what did all of it produce? A list. Everyone who landed on a 2 went onto a performance warning, which meant somebody then had to write those up, deliver them, track them, and follow up for months afterward. More meetings. More documentation. And not to say they shouldn’t have been on performance warnings and review cycle surfaced something, but where were the managers before? Were they actually a “2”?
After all of that, I kept coming back to something: I don’t think many people came out of it any clearer on what success in their role actually looked like. We spent a quarter deciding what to call people. We never spent an hour deciding what we were measuring.
A rating can only be as good as the thing behind it
A rating is an answer to a question. If nobody has written down the question, the rating is still just a guess.
So that’s where I’d start, and it isn’t with the form. For each role on your team: what are the three to five things this person owns, and what does doing them well actually look like? If you can answer that in writing, a review mostly writes itself. If you can’t, no scale is going to cover the gap.
Plenty of the small businesses I work with don’t yet have job descriptions with measurable results in them. That’s normal. It’s also fixable, and it’s a better first project than a review cycle. Start with what you’re measuring, then measure.
Two things that tend to go sideways with 1 to 5
Managers hold different bars. Ask four managers to rate the same person and you can get four different numbers, and none of them were being careless. One thinks a 3 is the honest, respectable default for someone doing their job. One thinks a 3 means you didn’t stand out. One has never given a 5 in her life. So the number ends up telling you as much about who someone reports to as it does about how they’re doing.
Big companies solve this with calibration, which is the month+ I just described. A twelve person company doesn’t have a director to hand a month to. Be careful about inheriting a tool that only works when it’s propped up by infrastructure you don’t have (and honestly don’t need).
“Meets expectations” lands like a C. You meant it as “doing the job well.” Most people hear “average.” We all went to school, and we all know what the middle of a five point scale means. So the quiet result of a review cycle can be telling a group of steady, reliable people that they’re unremarkable. That’s rarely what anyone intended.
If you’re already rating people, you’re not doing it wrong
You built something. That genuinely puts you ahead of most small businesses, and you can’t improve a process that doesn’t exist yet. Everything below is an iteration, not a correction.
The owners I work with who get this right didn’t get it right the first time. They put a version out, asked their managers and their team what was useless about it, and fixed that part the next cycle. That’s the whole method. Build it, use it, ask, adjust.
Three changes I’d suggest
1. Define the role before you assess the person. Write down the three to five things the role owns and what good looks like for each. Do this even if it’s rough. If you want a genuinely useful first goal for everyone on your team, have each person draft the description of their own role with measurable results, and then work through it together. You’ll learn a lot about where people think their job starts and stops.
2. Trade the abstract scale for a concrete one. Instead of asking a manager to rank someone against an invisible standard, ask something they can actually answer about a real person. Three that work well:
Reliance. Needs regular support, delivers reliably, trusted beyond the role, others rely on them. This one answers “where do I stand” in terms people care about, and it reads well out loud in a 1:1. It’s also the most subjective of the three.
Trajectory in role. Learning, doing, owning, multiplying (meaning they make other people better at it). This separates “new” from “not performing,” which matters if you’ve been hiring. Still learning after a year is worth a conversation, but a constructive one.
GWC. Does this person get it, want it, and have the capacity to do it? Three yes or no answers, from the People Analyzer in EOS (Gino Wickman’s Traction). It’s the sharpest of the three, because a no on “wants it” is a completely different conversation than a no on “capacity.” There’s no middle ground to hide in, which is either exactly what you need or too blunt for where you are.
3. Put the marker after the written feedback, not before it. When a mark sits at the top of a form it becomes the headline, and everything written below it reads as justification. At the bottom, people read the actual feedback first. One more thing that costs nothing: have the manager set their mark before they read the employee’s self assessment. Once you’ve read someone’s version of their own year you can’t unread it, and the gap between the two reads is the most useful conversation in the whole exercise.
The part no form can do for you
If a review is the first time someone is hearing that something isn’t landing, the scale was never the problem. A once a year document can’t carry a year of conversations that didn’t happen. (Check out our 1:1 guide to help your managers with that opportunity).
Build something simple, use it, ask the people who filled it out what was a waste of their time, and make the next one better. That’s not a compromise. For a small team, that’s the actual work.
I put together a free performance check-in template built on this approach. It’s made for small teams, it includes space to define the role before you assess anyone, and you can pick whichever of the three markers fits how you manage.
Created by Campfire Guide Amy J. Hamilton, PHR. She works alongside small business owners to build people frameworks that fit how they actually run. Consulting by the Campfire, Fort Collins, Colorado.
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