The Importance of Annual Reviews

Our firm, OpenView Venture Partners, has decided to take a more formal/software oriented approach to our performance review process. Management teams in all industries should make sure that they use some kind of formal annual review process to evaluate how their employees feel about personal work performance and the firm’s execution as a whole. As a Boston venture capital firm, we are working to better our employees experience and the work that they produce. It is easier to correct a problem if the employee is aware of it.

We are currently using a product called SuccessFactors Business Execution Software to accomplish the goal of having yearly peer reviews.

You can utilize your operational support team to set up, conduct and report back the results of the review surveys. The great thing is that it is anonymous so people feel as though they can give honest feedback. SuccessFactors also has many other functions such as a legal-check for the open text fields to make sure the comments do not include inappropriate language.

If your company does not already have this best practice in place, it would be great to start now!