Conversation beats reviews for careers
FORMAL performance reviews held once a year are outdated and miss the mark amid the changing nature of the workforce, says a Point Lonsdale author of a new book on the subject.
HR expert and author of Career Conversations Greg Smith said leaders should be holding frequent, more informal conversations with employees and show genuine interest in their career satisfaction and development.
Employees could now be looking for career conversations as often as weekly or fortnightly, Mr Smith said.
“Performance reviews need to be a lot more simplified, not having them as a bureaucratic, tick-the-box session you have every year,” he said.
The first book for the co-founder of Melbourne HR consulting firm deliberatepractice, Career Conversations is a finalist in the Australian Career Book Award, established last year to promote highquality writing in a time of exponential change in work and employment.
Mr Smith said employees were thinking about their career development every day but leaders often had little training and felt poorly equipped to have meaningful talks about their careers.
“They will do anything to avoid it, and often they don’t know how,” he said.
Career Conversations was aimed at helping leaders build better connections employees and create a better workplace culture.
Mr Smith said a key for leaders was not to focus on the process of performance review but on how they were connecting.
“You can do that by asking the right sort of questions,” he said.
He said there was a high degree of expectation, particularly from younger staff, that their leaders would help guide them in developing their careers.
“And you are not going to do it by old-fashioned performance reviews,” Mr Smith said.
“It comes back to understanding the individuals and what they need at their stage in their career.”
Educated in Geelong, Mr Smith has lived in Point Lonsdale for five years.
He is planning to write his next book on leadership competencies.
Careers Conversations ($29.95) is published by Wiley.