Over the course of the past two decades, I have participated in, created, and re-created dozens of performance calibration processes. This activity can be simultaneously one of the most dreaded and most valuable exercises a group can go through. And a critical portion of this process is the Performance Calibration meeting - where a set of supervisors come together to discuss the performance of employees and achieve agreement on performance appraisal ratings.
This doc goes through a few different models for running this calibration and some thoughts on when to apply each technique.
Getting Started: Set up Employees and your Calibration Framework
All the processes suggested require starting with a list of employees and a set of ratings:
When a team is small enough to just linearly run through the list, this is a simple framework for calibration. You can filter by level, manager, etc or just go straight through.
Another form of multi-level calibration (similar to #4), but is done using a draft stacking approach instead. Similar to how sports leagues draft incoming athletes, this process progressively selects employees from the available pool one-by-one.
Coda is an all-in-one doc for your team’s unique processes — the rituals that help you succeed. Teams that use Coda get rid of hundreds of documents, spreadsheets, and even bespoke apps, to work quickly and clearly in one place. This template is a Coda doc. Click around to explore.