Insights from Engagedly’s State of AI in HRM, 2nd Edition Survey.
A survey conducted by workplace equity analytics platform Syndio found that 25% of survey respondents felt that their performance reviews were affected negatively by the biases of their supervisors.
Considering that the 2024 Workplace Equity Trends Report found that in more than half of the organizations and in almost 2/3rd of enterprises, performance evaluations are being conducted only by the manager of the employee, the above statistics need to be improved.
The main reason behind this is that bias in employee performance reviews demotivates your top performers from doing their best, negatively impacts workplace productivity, and damages employees’ development and career advancement opportunities.
Thus, if you want to ensure high employee engagement and retention, as well as the overall success of your organization, you must reduce bias in performance reviews and make them fair and effective.
This article will help you identify different types of biases, their impact on employee performance reviews, and tips to reduce bias in employee performance reviews.
If you want to learn how to reduce bias in performance reviews, you must first understand them completely.
Bias in performance reviews are errors in judgment that occur when an individual lets their conscious or unconscious prejudices affect their evaluation of another person. They tend to lead to unfair judgments, either in favor of or against someone.
They are also known as implicit bias or unconscious bias.
Biases can manifest in multiple forms during performance reviews and tend to be influenced by factors like personal preferences, time, stereotypes, and even the performance management plan developed by your organization.
Some of the most common performance review biases that you should be acquainted with to reduce bias in performance reviews successfully are:
This bias occurs if you consider only the most recent performance instead of considering your employees’ performance throughout the year. It makes you overlook the contributions made by them throughout the year.
Under the halo effect, you will make the mistake of letting your employee’s one good performance or aspect overshadow their other performances or aspects, even if they are not equally good.
If you have a poor experience with an employee in regards to a single aspect, you will let that negative perception overshadow your judgment. It make you perceive their other performances or aspects as poor, even if that is not the case.
You will end up rating your employee’s performance in the middle of the spectrum instead of choosing a side. It happens when you find it difficult to make a decision and want to choose a safe option instead.
It will also make it difficult to identify top and low performers, which will negatively impact employee happiness.
This performance review bias will make you give your employees higher ratings than what their performance actually deserves. It results in you promoting someone who needs to improve while leaving behind someone who truly deserves recognition, promotion, and appreciation.
Thus, it will hamper your efforts of attracting and retaining top talents in your organization.
You will end up giving higher ratings to employees who share the beliefs, perceptions, and skills similar to you.
This is because we usually like people who are similar to us more. We also tend to find our qualities most desirable, and thus, individuals who are similar to us end up getting higher ratings.
However, this leads to a homogeneous work culture where the positive role of diversity and inclusion in talent management will be removed.
Gender bias is evident, and it refers to evaluating the performance of an individual based on their gender and, thus, stereotypes matching them.
For example, the performance of your female employees is being evaluated on the basis of their behavior and personality. In contrast, the performance of your male employees is being evaluated on the basis of their work.
This will lead to failure in empowering women in your workplace while also having an incorrect perception of the contributions made by both genders for the success of your organization.
Performance review bias will have a significant impact on the development of your employees in the following ways:
When managers evaluate employees with bias, they are more likely to make faulty decisions, either promoting someone to a critical position even if they are not deserving or failing to promote a deserving candidate.
This will mean that key assignments and tasks will be handled by less deserving candidates, which will affect your organization’s success.
It will also have negative effects on employee experience and employee productivity.
A biased performance review will make your employees feel mistreated or unappreciated, which will lead them to look for other jobs where they will feel more motivated and valued.
Additionally, they will stop sharing their ideas and strategies, and start contributing less to the success of your organization.
Unconscious bias in performance reviews will lead to inequality and unfair treatment, which in turn will have a direct impact on hiring, promotions, and retention within your organization.
It will also lead to less diversity and inclusion in your organization because dissimilar people will not be promoted, or they will not be allowed to contribute to key assignments even though they deserve it. In certain circumstances, they might not be hired in the first place.
These diversity and implicit biases will also prevent the sharing of creative and innovative ideas, which would have made your organization more competitive.
The four tips to reduce bias in employee performance reviews are:
The first tip for managers to reduce bias in performance reviews is to increase education and awareness.
To help your managers reduce biases, you must conduct workshops and training sessions that will help them understand and identify implicit assumptions and prejudgements.
This training will help them conduct performance assessments objectively and monitor and manage their own biases.
Encourage your managers to reflect on their biases regularly and become self-aware of their presence.
You can help them do so through ‘a-ha’ activities that will help them discover their biases in an evidence-based, non-confrontial manner.
The insights gathered will also help them in forming strategies to reduce and mitigate their biases and thus add to their qualities of being a good manager.
One of the ways to reduce bias in employee performance reviews is by standardizing evaluation criteria.
One way to address the performance review bias problem is to use standardized performance metrics and rubrics.
This standardization will help your managers ensure consistency and objectivity in their employee performance reviews while also allowing them to handle workplace conflicts like pros.
Some of the most common employee performance metrics and rubrics that your managers can use for their performance reviews are revenue per employee, number of errors, work efficiency, net promoter score, and human capital ROI.
One practice that managers must follow to reduce bias in performance reviews is measuring and evaluating employees’ performance based on their job roles.
To do so, they must align their performance evaluation forms and tools with the employee’s job descriptions.
The job descriptions will serve as a guideline for setting and reviewing performance indicators. They will also help determine the expected targets and outcomes for each position.
This is another tip for reducing bias in performance reviews and ensuring the development of a great manager.
By setting up 360-degree feedback for your employees, they will get feedback from their subordinates, peers, and managers on multiple topics.
Such comprehensive feedback will help reduce bias in employee performance reviews, as it will give you and your managers a multi-perspective yet accurate view of the employee’s skill level, performance, and areas for improvement.
You must ensure that the performance evaluation tools used by your managers support diverse perspectives so that the individual biases get balanced out, resulting in accurate and insightful employee performance reviews.
Some of the ways they can support diverse perspectives in by using techniques like 180-degree feedback, taking feedback from the customers they are dealing with, and incorporating peer reviews.
One more way in which your managers can reduce bias in employee performance reviews is by using data over time.
Your managers must collect and analyze employee performance data over time to avoid recency bias and gain a comprehensive view.
By continuously interacting and staying up to date with employees, your managers will get a clearer idea about their performance and free them from biases as well.
Additionally, to have extended data for performance review, your managers must conduct regular check-ins.
Ideally, they must have one-on-one meetings with the employees either weekly or at least monthly. This will not only help them remove bias from their judgment but also help them build a trusting relationship.
These regular employee check-ins will also help them align employee goals with your organization’s objectives, resulting in better contributions to your organization’s success.
To mitigate and reduce bias in performance reviews, your managers must build a bias-resistant review culture. Here’s how to do it:
To create a bias-resistant review culture, your managers must promote continuous feedback and development rather than only annual or semi-annual reviews.
This means that instead of forcing rankings and comparing employees’ performance with their peers, compare it with their past performance, as this will be more accurate, and employees will find it more fair.
Also, clearly communicate performance criteria and development goals before the beginning of each performance review period.
Lastly, by conducting regular meetings for feedback, your managers will be able to help them achieve their goals while removing their own biases through continued proof.
To reduce bias in employee performance reviews, your managers must encourage the development of an inclusive environment where diverse perspectives are heard, valued, and recognized.
This is one of the best ways of reducing bias because it will help us better understand the employees and their underlying strengths, motivations, and histories.
Once managers and peers know a person beyond their surface-level characteristics, they will be able to remove biases caused by those superficial perceptions.
It is important that your managers reduce bias in performance reviews to ensure that they are fair and effective. By following the above four steps and creating a bias-resistant culture, your managers will be able to the performance reviews are objective and accurate.
This will lead to a better work environment with engaged and motivated employees that will help you achieve your organization’s objectives and success. By using tools like Engagedly’s performance reviews, your managers will be able to easily carry out unbiased talent assessments of all employees and help them reach their full potential.
It is crucial to update the evaluation criteria regularly, as this ensures relevancy and alignment with the employees’ current job roles and your organization’s goals. This will help reduce the risk of biased or outdated assessments.
Your managers can become more aware of their biases by undergoing unconscious bias training, seeking regular feedback on their evaluations, and reflecting on their decision-making processes.
Technology offers features like data analytics, automated performance tracking, and 360-degree feedback, all of which contribute towards making the reviews more objective.
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