How to Host a Fair and Productive Performance Calibration Meeting
Is your performance appraisal system fair and transparent?
Do you evaluate employees on their performance rather than any personal biases or perceptions about their work?
Does your process enable every employee to progress in your organization regardless of rank, title, background, or manager?
The best way to answer yes to these questions is to conduct performance calibration meetings as part of your regular review cycles.
This article will:
- Delve into the purpose of performance calibration sessions.
- Explore their role in the broader performance appraisal process.
- Provides practical tips on conducting productive and fair calibration meetings.
We will enable you and your people leaders to host fair and productive performance reviews that empower all employees in your organization and inspire growth.
⚖️ What is a performance calibration meeting?
A performance calibration meeting is a structured session to evaluate and align your employees' performance ratings or assessments.
Managers and evaluators of respective teams or departments gather to review and discuss individual employee performance scores and determine how they compare. The purpose is to reach a consensus and establish a standardized understanding of organizational performance levels.
In these meetings, participants might discuss factors like:
- goal achievement;
- competencies;
- skills;
- behaviors;
- overall performance.
What is the purpose of performance calibration sessions?
The primary purpose of calibration meetings is to ensure fairness, consistency, and accuracy in the performance evaluation process. Doing so will minimize biases, address discrepancies, and promote a more consistent and objective approach to performance assessment.
Example: Alice and Jacob work in similar roles and produce outstanding results for the team.
Alice receives her appraisal scores from a strict manager who is hard to please, and scores an overall 6 out of 10.
Jacob receives his 8 out of 10 score from a more generous manager who believes that positive scores motivate team members.
At face value, Jacob looks like the more vital team member. He's more likely to be considered for promotions and receive a bump in compensation, which is unfair to Alice.
Performance calibration meetings iron out these inconsistencies and ensure Alice remains motivated to do well for the organization.
🧩 How do calibration meetings fit into the overall performance appraisal process?
Calibration meetings should happen every performance review cycle to ensure fairness and consistency across the board. They should be part of your organization's broader performance management strategy, which includes setting goals, assessing progress, and providing feedback.
Performance review calibration usually occurs at the end of the assessment period but before employees receive their appraisal scores or participate in performance conversations. The meeting is when all managers can gather to review their respective performance appraisals and reach a common agreement.
📚 Check out our complete guide to performance review calibration.
💡 6 Key reasons for conducting calibration meetings
Think again if you're considering skipping calibration meetings. Here are six crucial reasons why these sessions are a must-have in any performance review cycle.
- Improve employee engagement: Calibration meetings foster a sense of fairness and trust in the performance management system, ultimately boosting employee engagement.
- Encourage supervisors to fully consider their performance appraisal ratings: Calibration prompts reviewers to contemplate their ratings, leading to more meaningful feedback.
- Inspire discussion amongst supervisors: Reviewers are not alone but part of a team. Calibration sessions provide a forum for open dialogue and to consider different management styles.
- Apply similar standards across all employees: Objectively comparing appraisals ensures you hold all employees to the same performance standards.
- Identify high and low performers for greater talent management: A standardized approach makes it easier to pinpoint potential leadership candidates or offer support to those who need it.
- Weed out bias: Performance calibration meetings offer a powerful opportunity to review and refine the performance review process, ensuring all employees are judged fairly, and guarding against unfairness, whether intentional or not.
🗣️ How do you conduct a performance calibration meeting?
1. Pre-meeting prep
Ask all supervisors and managers to complete performance reviews based on employee goals, accomplishments, and feedback. Complete this step before the meeting—the calibration session is a chance to tweak performance appraisal scores rather than be inspired to review employees from scratch.
If you have previously determined a set of rating standards, distribute these to support managers with their scoring.
Example: If you're using a 5-point scoring system where 1= Unsatisfactory, 3= Average, and 5 = Outstanding, you need to clarify what an employee must achieve to receive each score.
2. Meeting logistics and planning
Set up the calibration meetings in advance, considering the timeline of your performance review cycle and organizational requirements. Share a timeline with key dates for the calibration process, ensuring it occurs before managers conduct individual performance reviews or make compensation and promotion decisions.
Share a calibration agenda outlining expectations and requesting that managers come prepared with their draft performance ratings to facilitate meaningful discussions during the meeting.
3. Comparison and discussion
Begin the meeting by clarifying your company's overall goals and objectives and determining the performance levels you require from your workforce to meet business needs.
Use the meeting time to compare individual employee ratings across teams or departments to identify discrepancies, potential biases, or rating inconsistencies. Engage in open discussions about the performance factors you've considered, and share perspectives, insights, and justifications about the ratings each manager has given.
If you notice any rating inflation or deflation, discuss the potential for rating bias, including how it may occur and what you can do to eliminate it.
4. Finalize ratings and adjust as required
Reach a group consensus, adjusting individual ratings to ensure they align with your performance standards and expectations. Document all changes, including the reasons behind any rating adjustments.
Once you have finalized your ratings, conclude the meeting, share the scores with your employees, and make promotion or compensation decisions knowing that your process is fair.
📝 Download our calibration templates for kickstarting your calibration sessions. You'll get two resources: a meeting guide and checklist & a spreadsheet to enter data and get a bell curve and statistics per department.
🧑🏻🤝🧑🏻 Who should participate in a performance calibration meeting?
Your calibration meeting will vary depending on the size and makeup of your organization but will usually include a mix of:
- department managers and VPs;
- people partners;
- cross-functional leaders.
Follow these guidelines to determine your meeting structure based on company size:
- Growing companies of 1-50 people: In small organizations, the best practice is to host 1:1 meetings with each manager who completes performance evaluations.
- Larger companies of 50-150 people: It may be too time-consuming to host 1:1s with every manager; instead, create calibration teams of representative supervisors who will review and compare performance ratings.
- Companies of 150+ employees: Use a calibration committee from sample departments, with HR actively involved.
Remember: Any calibration meeting aims to promote consistency across your organization. It's not to award any team for having the highest-scoring employees.
🏆 What are some best practices for ensuring effective performance calibration meetings?
Calibration meetings enhance the overall integrity of the performance evaluation process and support the organization in making fair and informed decisions. But only if you structure your meetings correctly!
Follow these best practices, and you'll be on the right track.
1. Set clear meeting objectives
Head into your meeting with a clear understanding of why you're gathering and the desired outcome. Use a model like the SMART framework to set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound goals.
2. Establish a clear timeline
Prioritize performance meetings in your calendar to keep your review cycles on track. Postponing these sessions can lead to delayed employee feedback, negatively impacting employee growth plans and ultimately preventing your business from progressing to meet company objectives.
Your timeline should include:
- pre-meeting preparation
- the actual meeting
- follow-up activities like recording and sharing the results
3. Send pre-meeting checklists to participants
Before the meeting, send each attendee a checklist of tasks so everyone is prepared. Use the below suggestions to create your own:
- Familiarize yourself with the rating standards.
- Complete individual employee performance ratings for your direct reports.
- Self-audit your ratings.
- Consider whom you wish to nominate for promotions or compensation increases.
- Prepare questions and feedback to discuss at the meeting.
4. Establish a performance distribution model
A performance distribution model, or forced ranking or forced distribution model, categorizes performance ratings into predefined groups or percentiles. Why? This method aims to represent the overall performance levels within an organization. Some examples include:
- Percentile Ranking: Rank employees based on their performance relative to others in the organization. Example: You may consider the top 10% high performers, the middle 70% average performers, and the bottom 20% low performers.
- Absolute Performance: Unlike ranking employees against each other, this approach evaluates each employee's performance independently based on a specific, predefined level of excellence. Example: Customer service employees answering 100% of calls within 30 seconds might receive the top performance score of 5.
- Three-Tiered Ranking: Divide employees into three distinct categories, such as "Top Performers," "Solid Contributors," and "Developing/Underperforming." Determine the percentage of employees assigned to each category based on organizational requirements.
- Bell Curve (Normal Distribution): Distribute ratings along a bell-shaped curve, with the majority in the middle range, representing average performance. Fewer employees fall into the high and low-performance categories.
5. Share previous calibration data
Unless this is your first calibration meeting, use data from previous performance calibrations to inform future decisions. Comparing data between reviews gives insight into whether or not accuracy is improving or declining, which can help you adjust your performance calibration process accordingly.
6. Train all reviewers on their role
Performance calibrations are a collaborative effort, and everyone should understand their role. Educate your raters on the review process and how to approach conversations with employees, providing specific training to support them in understanding the system and recording ratings accurately.
7. Promote open dialogue
Calibration relies on discussing any outliers to your expected performance distribution.
Managers should be ready to provide context about exceptional performance if an employee scores highly.
Similarly, managers must justify why they've awarded low scores to a performer and outline the support they've provided to help these employees score higher.
This area of the meeting is only possible if you build an environment where everyone feels comfortable expressing their views. During calibration sessions, encourage managers to ask questions and provide your committee with an opportunity to give feedback without judgment. Don't be afraid to disagree—this dialogue will help all parties reach a consensus.
8. Maintain confidentiality
Imagine the chaos if an employee discovered their manager downgraded their scores in a calibration meeting.
Performance calibrations must be confidential for compliance and to maintain trust across your organization. Ensure all communications, such as emails, ratings, and records, are stored securely.
😟 Beware of 3 challenges of performance calibration meetings
Calibration meetings should be a staple of any organization's performance reviews, but that doesn't mean they're always easy.
Be aware of these three challenges of calibration meetings.
1. Arranging calibration meetings in-person
In distributed workforces, video conference calls may be the only option available for your calibration meeting. However, arrange real-time in-person meetings where everyone can interact face-to-face for greater results.
MIT's Human Dynamics Lab analyzed hundreds of hours of data on performance drivers such as body language and tone of voice.
The results concluded that the most valuable communication happens in person, with a 35% variation in team performance explained by the number of times team members gathered face-to-face.
2. Overcoming bias
Sarah Harris, Global Lead, Diversity & Engagement at Grünenthal Group, explains how easily bias can creep into the review process:
"Unconscious bias comes from a survival mechanism in the subconscious mind. We subconsciously categorize information, and it affects us all. The definition of unconscious bias is favoritism towards or prejudice against people of a particular ethnicity, gender, or social group that influences one's actions or perceptions. So, how can unconscious bias affect performance ratings?
1. Proximity bias: You rate those colleagues whom you spend more time with higher. In a hybrid working world, this is more prominent than ever before. You are likely to rate higher colleagues in-office versus remote.
2. Recency bias: You rate recent achievements more highly than those at the beginning of the year.
3. Similarity bias: You are more favorable towards those like you. For example, you could be more favorable toward reviewees with similar interests and skills or have attended the same university.
4. Confirmation bias: You seek information to confirm your pre-existing beliefs.
5. Leniency bias: You overlook underperformance."
➡️ These are just a handful of the types of bias that can regularly infiltrate the workplace. Check out our comprehensive guide on feedback bias to learn about many others and what we can do to stamp them out.
3. Navigating group dynamics
Your calibration committee will comprise a range of personalities and management styles. And shock, horror, not everyone will get along.
The key to successful performance calibrations is understanding how group dynamics work.
Remember that calibration aims to reach a consensus, so everyone must feel heard and respected.
Try the following techniques:
- Appoint a facilitator who can act as a mediator if conversations become heated.
- Create clear communication rules and establish boundaries, such as avoiding insults or offensive language to get points across.
- Encourage calibration participants to demonstrate active listening.
- Consider replacing calibration committee members for future cycles.
➡️ Drive performance and growth with Zavvy's 360° growth system
Zavvy offers performance review software with in-built calibration to take the legwork out of the process. Note: Calibration can only happen before sharing feedback with reviewees.
Here's how it works on Zavvy:
- Reviewers receive a notification that calibration is underway.
- Reviewers may apply filters in Zavvy, such as feedback type, feedback cycle, manager, hire date, question, and more.
- Reviewers may adjust scores (as required) based on calibration committee discussions.
Once your managers are done calibrating, the results are ready for your employees. They will only see the calibrated scores.
Best of all? Zavvy automates collecting and delivering performance feedback with just a few clicks!
📅 Ready to design and maintain an equitable performance review process in your organization? Book a Zavvy demo today.