The Process

The talent bar

After evaluating your team’s performance how are you going to decide who to promote? Or exit? Or who to reward with a bonus? This is where the talent bar comes into play, translating performance into quantifiable outcomes, such as additional compensation, promotions or terminations.

The talent bar outlines the minimum requirements for skills, deliverables and culture according to employee seniority. Employee performance is compared to the talent bar, and being below it or above it carries meaningful consequences.

Let’s take the example of three members of the data science team - Alice, Chris and Mary. They are all Senior members of the team and so expectations are high, with a raised talent bar. Their final grade depends on how their performance stacks up against the bar:

1. Alice performed very well in the past quarter; she surpassed expectations by almost a full grade in all dimensions, performing in line with her more senior colleagues - based on her performance she is an A-player, putting her on course for promotion
2. Chris is performing roughly in line with expectations, he is graded as above bar and will need to improve his performance to advance further
3. Mary is reaching the bar in most dimensions, but the fact she fails to meet expectations in one of them is sufficient to warrant an underperformer grade

You can see our working Google Sheets template for detailed calculations on how performance across dimensions translates to the final performance grade. We outline the processes for promotions, compensation, bonuses and exits - and how being an A-player or underperformer affects each of them - further down in the playbook.

You can learn more about how the talent bar is implemented on RevolutPeople here.

Running the process

The performance review process runs every quarter to ensure that both recognition of great performance and reaction to underperformance are quick. This review process is not a 360 review, which typically offers limited benefits at the expense of employee time - we found that employees tend to be too generous with each other, so 360 reviews usually don’t provide useful feedback.

The performance team owns the process and works with managers and employees to gather input. This is split into three stages:

Step 1 | Performance reviews (1-2 weeks) - the performance team sends out requests for reviews to line managers; managers will fill in the scorecards and can request additional reviews on the employee from other colleagues, but these do not influence the employee’s rating

Step 2 | Performing the grade calculations and calibrating results (1 week) - grades are automatically calculated based on the scorecards, but calibrations by the performance team are often required to:

a. Ensure that A-players account for no more than 15–25%; some managers can be overly generous, so it’s important to adjust grades post-facto

b. Check for missing data or insufficient justifications in reviews

c. Examine outliers (e.g. sudden changes in performance, extraordinarily high or low values)

At this stage, the CEO and top management will review and approve the final grades to ensure results are fair and identify areas where additional resources or attention is required (e.g. consistently underperforming teams).

Step 3 | Announcing results and delivering feedback (1 week) - employees receive the final results through email and can discuss them with their manager on their weekly one-to-one meeting.

The final results have a tangible impact on the employee’s career trajectory and compensation and can lead to a promotion or even a performance improvement plan - read the next section to find out how these should be handled.

For a comprehensive guide on how to manage the performance review process on RevolutPeople, you can read more here.