Employee Reviews

External Employee Reviews and Workplace Wellbeing Action Plans

An external review allows staff to speak honestly and make constructive suggestions to address work challenges with an independent person – someone who is not their manager or employer. This helps staff feel safe to be open and honest. 

This Working Life ensures that staff reviews follow important principles:

• A focus on identifying and finding solutions to workplace challenges.
• The recognition that challenges are a shared responsibility between employers and staff, and that everyone has a contribution to make to overcoming them.
• The knowledge that solutions come from trust and collaboration.

Here’s how This Working Life’s 7 Step Process of employee reviews works:

1. We meet with each member of staff informally (usually over a cuppa) to learn what is working well and what each person sees as their challenges at work.
2. We encourage the person to identify solutions to these challenges.
3. We record this information and check with the person that we have understood and reflected their issues faithfully and that they agree to us sharing them (If not, we ensure we correct our record until the person is happy that it captures their meaning truthfully).
4. We collate the information into an Issues and Actions list that we then brief the employer/manager on.
5. We hold a Workplace Wellbeing Action Workshop that brings everyone together to go through the Issues and Action list and identify which actions each person is willing to undertake. Often small teams are formed to address an issue.
6. We develop an Action Plan from the workshop that outlines all actions and the people responsible for each one. This includes timeframes and measures of success.
7. We review the Action Plan with the employer/manager to fine tune it and identify other challenges that have arisen or changes that need to be made.