Important Questions For Employee Review Meetings: Past

Employee review meetings are a great way for a supervisor and employee to discuss job satisfaction, productivity and improvement over an established time period. They are commonplace in most businesses today and can almost be a 360-degree review that sees a discussion of everything from peers to customers and back to work.

The goal is quite clear: determine expectations, reinforce good performance, increase teamwork and improve communication on all levels of the business. Similarly but solely from an employer’s point of view, employee review meetings can determine salary increases, enforce disciplinary or promotion thoughts and set the next goals for the employee.

Past situation questions

There are multiple questions that bosses ask as they reflect on the time since the last meeting and these include: how’s your job changed, what skills have you learnt, what have you learnt about yourself or the job, did you meet your goals and where are you looking to improve, however, the two key questions to ask are:
- Tell me about your favourite project in the last 12 months.
- What do you regret about the last 12 months and what did it teach you?

This will tell you a multitude of things. It will highlight the highs and the lows of your employees and how this affected them. The first question is ideal to help find any patterns of success from said employee and show you what motivates this particular team member.

The second identifies things that you should be keeping an eye on with regards to this person and their work. For instance, why did this happen? Also, getting them to tell you how they resolved this will show if they are capable of learning from mistakes and coming back strong.

Reflecting on the past year for example is vital in understanding what somebody has done – both good and bad – and how they’ve changed. The idea of learning from these reviews is of paramount importance for both you and the employee so make sure you know how the employee plans to deal with the past 12 months going forward.

Things to remember are never be overly intrusive but always look to understand where the employee stands in regards to his job and future. Did they enjoy the last 12 months? This will help you to decide how you go about making the next 12 even better and more productive, to keep both of you happy.

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