Reviews

A process to request, gather, and deliver peer feedback and self review on a bi-annual basis. We will use required review cycles not just to check boxes for GSA, but also to help people thrive, grow, and succeed.

There is more information about GSA/TTS requirements in the TTS Handbook: https://handbook.tts.gsa.gov/performance-management/

Why

  • Feedback is good, and we can all use help being better
  • It provides constructive outlets for kind, helpful, and specific feedback
  • It is a GSA Requirement

When

This whole process will take about a month. Aim to leave ~2 weeks for gathering feedback, and another ~2 weeks to edit and deliver reviews.

  • Mid-Year: complete reviews in May, due June 1
  • End-Of-Year: complete reviews in September, due November 6th

How

360-style feedback

For both Mid-year and End-of-year reviews, the leadership team will

  1. Publish a Google Form for nominating peers for feedback
  2. Schedule short 15-30 minute meetings to ask peer feedback questions and take notes
  3. Anonymize and synthesize peer feedback
  4. Include peer feedback in delivered written reviews

Some people prefer to write their feedback, so it is encouraged to provide that option as well.

Self reviews

For End-of-year reviews, the leadership team will

  1. Publish a self-review worksheet that assists people in documenting their progress toward each area of our Performance Plan.
  2. Synthesize self-review in delivered written reviews

For self-review, many people find it useful to keep an ongoing private document with a bullet-list of projects and accomplishments. Fight recency bias; It can be difficult to remember what you did 6 months ago.

Team Leads create and deliver reviews

Your Team lead will:

  • Align, normalize, and edit raw feedback
  • Send your review document via email
  • Meet with you to talk about your review and answer questions

For Team Leads

Writing Reviews

  • TTS has a very helpful training deck on recognizing bias and creating equity in performance reviews. Please review it.
  • Spend some time thinking about the raw feedback for each person, and the shape of review it defines. Make some notes. Review content should be ~ 98% Self Review and Peer Feedback content – edited by you for clarity.
  • Spend some time thinking about aligning and normalizing the feedback across all of the people on your team. Review your notes.
  • Use provided templates to create your review documents
  • During editing, peer feedback data should be anonymized

Delivering feedback

  • Schedule :25 minute 1:1s to talk about the review document and answer any questions.
  • Send the review document via email in advance of the 1:1s. Try to send the documents the same day as your meeting is scheduled. Be sure to leave at least a couple hours for people to read their review prior to the call.
  • Share review documents with the People Lead, who will make sure everything gets into HRLinks, as required by GSA.