Bias in Performance Management
When discussing bias in performance management, it’s common to talk about bias as it relates to performance evaluations – what ratings people are receiving and feedback objectivity. Yet there are practices we can apply to mitigate bias at every stage of effective performance management.
Biases and Stereotypes
Biases are mental shortcuts our brain takes to quickly process information and understand behavior. This swift processing often leads to inaccurate conclusions and often prevents even well-meaning folks from making objective decisions.
There are many biases, both conscious and unconscious, that can affect decision-making. Among the most common are:
- In-group effect — Favoring employees in one’s in-group, often associated with cultural cohesion. An example of the “in-group effect” is affinity bias, or giving preferential treatment to someone because they share similar experiences or remind you of someone you like.
- Personal bias/favoritism — Allowing your impressions of employees or your personal feelings about them to dominate the performance rating process.
- Consensus bias — Assuming your own thoughts, choices, and judgments are common and shared with others.
- Confirmation bias —Tendency to search for, interpret, focus on, and remember information that aligns with preconceived opinions and reject or discount information that does not conform to what you already believe.
- Halo/horns effect — Viewing someone positively/negatively because of competence or incompetence in a single area.
- Age, gender, race, ability stereotypes — Viewing performance and behaviors differently depending on identity.
This list is not exhaustive and may feel overwhelming. The tricky part about bias is that people are often unaware that they are making a biased decision in the moment or even believe that their decision is unbiased — even if they are fully aware of common biases. To mitigate bias, one should build a process which actively and intentionally looks for information that contradicts their thoughts and challenges their assumptions.
Building the Process to Mitigate Bias
There are three main stages to performance management, and by being thoughtful and slowing down, we can build the process to mitigate bias throughout all of them to create a more objective performance evaluation.
Setting Goals
Goal-setting is arguably the most important step in performance management.
Goals ensure the right work is prioritized and serves as a basis for the feedback that informs evaluation at the end of the year. This is not about people setting the same goals, it’s more about the goals being equally challenging, depending on their current skill level, proficiency, mastery in the role.
Conducting Ongoing Check-ins
Check-ins are the most essential part of performance management. Starting with as little as 15 minutes, meet as a group or with each individual. Providing a time to connect will promote employee engagement and is a great opportunity to provide meaningful two-way feedback.
- Setting aside time - Finding the time to meet regularly is a common challenge for many teams. It is important to meet to limit the ability for biases to fill in the gaps when people don't communicate and make assumptions when time is short.
- Individualized approach - Not all employees may need the same amount of time or attention. Some direct reports might be new to the role or working on a new or difficult assignment. Be objective in determining the length and cadence of your check-ins for each direct report as they may have different needs.
- Meaningful feedback - It’s easy to focus on day-to-day tasks versus big goals and development conversations. Pause to reflect:
- Are you discussing how the work and projects they may work on could contribute to their learning?
- What progress are they making in their work and development?
- How are they using their talents to make an impact?
- Keeping track - Have a mechanism to keep notes of your conversations. This will ease the heavy lift of annual evaluations and help avoid overemphasizing recent work.
Evaluating Performance
When ongoing check-ins are implemented throughout the year, the final performance evaluation feels more like a summary of conversations and eliminates any surprises. A lot of the work done to eliminate bias during your on-going check-ins will support this effort. For example, notes from prior check-ins facilitate a review of the entire year instead of just focusing on the most recent project.
In preparing for reviews, ask for input from employee’s peers, direct reports, and important partners in other departments and units. Evaluate the relevance and usefulness of that input and compare it to other information about the person’s performance (e.g., your observations and available metrics). Consistency is key; determine whether to request external input and apply that decision to the entire team.
Adopting these practices will minimize the likelihood that biases will skew performance evaluations, reduce possibly anxiety on the part of the employee unsure what to expect during the review, and promote ongoing engagement and connection among individuals, supervisors, and teams.