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Love them or hate them, performance reviews have become part of the Australian office landscape. Every 12 months or so employees are called on to meet their managers to talk over their recent successes and shortcomings and to map out a course of action for the future.

For some, they are something to dread: a pointless rehashing of the past. But they need not be a waste of time. Planning your performance review and keeping some key objectives in mind can often bring about positive change at work. Managers who put in a similar effort can expect better results from staff.

According to Peter Wilson, the national president of the Australian Human Resources Institute, performance reviews started to appear in Australia's largest companies in the 1960s and in the public sector in the mid- to late-1980s.
The practice has since spread to the majority of Australian workplaces, creating work for hundreds of human resources consultants.

Reviews should be a win-win situation for managers and staff but the essence of the process can get lost in the execution. "If they could get away with never doing it, the majority of managers would never have a performance discussion in their lives," admits Ross McLelland, a management consultant and the managing director of Pacific Consulting.

"It's like budgeting. If budgets were voluntary I think the majority of managers wouldn't do them. [They] are hard, they take time and you don't like doing them. But what decent business doesn't have a budget?"

Part of the problem can be ill-conceived attempts by managers to boost staff performance by simply pointing out errors."When a performance review is used primarily to highlight the mistakes an employee has made there is very little value in it," says Barry Vienet, the managing director of human resources consultancy Beilby Corporation.

A balanced summary of both positive and negative developments is needed when assessing a worker's performance.

Vienet also recommends both managers and employees have clear goals for the review so an accurate assessment can be quickly completed. Besides making the process less arduous, it will leave the bulk of the discussion for planning the year ahead.

Managers and employees alike might baulk at filling out 15-page review forms but McLelland thinks the process at least forces reluctant participants to the table to discuss performance issues face to face.

Reviews that include surprise criticisms followed by an intense or dramatic exchange of words are a sure-fire sign that things are not working as they should. "One of the big things we are finding in our research is that there shouldn't be any surprises in a performance review," says Andrew Noblet, a senior lecturer in organisational behaviour at Deakin University.
At the other extreme, tedious reviews also probably miss the mark.

"One way performance reviews can become a bore is when an employee does not have any real influence over the path they are to take or the goals that are set," Noblet says. He believes allowing employees to identify new challenges combats boredom and can lead to greater staff retention.

Workers also need to be proactive if they want a positive outcome. "There is as much responsibility on an employee as an employer to make an appraisal system work well," Noblet says. "It's a bad situation where an employee hasn't given the process much thought leading up to the appraisal and then thinks of a lot of things they should have said afterwards."
Wilson says in some companies staff have little say about their future.

"Worse-practice companies are often run by a benevolent dictator who expects everyone to do as they say without any discussion," he says. "[In such situations] formal performance reviews are avoided because the chief keeps changing his or her mind and does not like to be held to account when those changes occur."

But where the process is working, forward planning for reviews can yield good results. "At the end of the day it is all about the preparation to get there," he says.