The Coaching Cafe Podcast

Performance Reviews: Coaching Changes Everything

• Open Door Coaching

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Is the annual performance conversation season a chance to turn around engagement? 

Last week kicked off our new Coaching Café Podcast series by unpacking the newly released Gallup State of the Global Workplace Report for 2025.  

But the headlines are hard to ignore: 

  • Is the global workplace at breaking point? 
  • Employee engagement on the brink (of collapse) 
  • Management engagement falls from 30% to 27% (no other worker category has experienced as significant decline). 

This round of Coaching Cafés Podcasts we are focusing on enabling effective performance conversations. Understandably, this might feel worrying for some managers, given low engagement scores.  

However, we believe there is a real opportunity. If done right, the annual performance conversation season could be a chance for many managers to begin the turnaround of employee engagement.  

Therefore, join Natalie and Paula as we explore: 

💡 How to approach performance conversations as a catalyst for engagement 
💡 Why traditional performance reviews often miss the mark 
💡 Coaching strategies to make annual conversations more meaningful 

Let’s focus on enabling effective performance conversations …and see how coaching can make a difference.   

If you are a regular, you know the vibe and the great contribution that you make to our discussions; so we look forward to welcoming you back and offering you a value-packed 30 minutes each Tuesday.

If you’ve not joined us for a Coaching Café Podcast, now is your opportunity to schedule this time for your professional and personal development.  In no time at all, you’ll be looking forward to Tuesdays, just like we all do! 

 

Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed the podcast please leave us a 5 star review where ever you listened to us! It helps promote the podcast to streaming services and other people.

Watch the webinar of this episode or read the blog by visiting our website.

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[Music] Welcome to the Coaching Cafe podcast.[Music] Today, join Natalie and Paula as we explore how to approach performance conversations as a catalyst for engagement, why traditional performance reviews often miss the mark, and coaching strategies to make annual conversations more meaningful. We hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you do, consider leaving us a five-star review.[Music] We acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on the lands on which we meet today, and they continue to connect into the land, borders and communities of Australia. We pay our respects to them, their elders past, present and emerging. Well, it's a very good morning for some of you, a good afternoon, and a very good evening to many of you, if you're listening to this podcast all around the world or joining us live, welcome to the Coaching Cafe. My name is Natalie Ashtar from the Open Door Coaching Group, and I'm joined on the line by our resident, HR specialist and guru, Paula James. Hello, Paula. Hi, and welcome everyone. Today, we're talking about is the annual performance conversation season, a chance to turn around engagement? Well, I did say I would try not to get on the band wagon. I'd get too fired up and passionate. I'll try to keep a little bit on it, but we're talking about two conversations today, which can merge. One is the annual performance conversation season. So, people in organizations all around the world are going into the annual performance conversation season, and on top of that, we have been discussing engagement in our workplace of the back of last week's Coaching Cafe, where we talked about the decrease of the engagement in our workplace. So, the question is, with these two big, significant events happening, the decrease in engagement and performance conversations, is this really the opportunity that we have in our workplaces to build engagement? Rather than have performance conversations be a negative, for some and for many, can we use it as a real opportunity to build engagement? And as coaches and as leaders, we pay a really critical vital role in this, and so that's our conversation for today. If you are new to the Coaching Cafe, welcome. We are all about creating a community, and we are also about celebrating the achievements of our community. So, today we're getting a very big shout out to Robin, who's just shared with us that she has achieved her NCC. So, we are braced with more than one guru now on this across our alumni. Congratulations, Robin. We have been, you've been getting that everyone saying, well done to you in the short chat, and it's very well observed. A wonderful, wonderful achievement, and acknowledgement of your Coaching contributions. So, wonderful that we can celebrate that with you here today. We are about creating shared learning experiences, having thought, provoking conversations, and many of you are collecting your CVEs. Robin, your start to collect your CCEU again, and so they will be available to you at the end of the session. So, let's talk about where they're at. Last week on the Coaching Cafe, we introduced you to Gallops, State of the Global Workplace Report for 2025, but you might have heard that I was excited to open up the report, because I'm hoping engagement's gone up, that's like we're on a crusade to build better workplaces, to build psychologically safe workplaces and culture of coaching with your organisations, because we have the ability to enable engagement. Alas, when we opened up the report, engagement's actually fallen. It's fallen for the first time, it's fallen twice in 12 years, actually. One was off the back of lockdowns, and now we're off the back of whatever's happening in our workplaces. So, in particular, management engagement fell from 30% out to 27%. There's billions of dollars worth of loss involved in that, and individual contributions of remain flat. You can go to Gallops and you can download the report for yourself, you can see the statistics across different workplaces, and I'm not against different workplaces, the big department across different countries. The other statistics I shared with you, particularly in Australia and New Zealand, is that our engagement is tracking at about 23%, globally, it's 21%. So, just to get a perspective, if you have a look around your workplace, or you even look at the numbers of people that are on the coaching cafe today, just imagine that one in four of us pumped up, excited, ready to do a great day's work, and the other three are like, yeah, whatever. I just think it's such a shame, it's such a loss of potential, it's such a, and that has an impact on well-being and thriving, and what happens at home as well. As coaches, we have an enormous role to play here, and that's the so-called crusade that we're on, to assist organisations to turn around employee engagement. So, that's what we talked about last week. We laid out those statistics, showed you where you can access those reports for your country as well. I want to add another statistic to you, because you know that we love the research. The statistics from Gallop around performance reviews, specifically, they suggest that only 14% of employees strongly agree that the performance reviews they receive inspire them to do better, to perform better, only 14%. Only 26% of employees strongly agree that the performance reviews they receive are accurate. So, one in four people think that when they receive that performance review, it's accurate. And only 29% of people strongly agree that they are fair. So, one in three people are walking out of their other performance review at this time of the year, thinking, "Well, that was fair." The other two thirds of people are walking out of that performance review, thinking, "Well, that was a total waste of time. Totally unfair. It wasn't accurate." Or, "My manager knows nothing about me." And, "Milz, I hear you." You say the results do not surprise you at all. They don't surprise us. And that's probably the issue. It's like, "What are we going to do?" We as leaders, as coaches, as managers, I think we have a huge opportunity to do something about this. But, when we think about disengagement in the workplace, that one in, you know, that two thirds of the workplace are completely disengaged, then you go into this performance and your performance review season. We are looking at my opinion as a perfect storm. Now, this is a beautiful photo. You can see it on our block, a beautiful photo that I took in January. This is a perfect storm. It's a beautiful photo of an aurora where the skies in the southern hemisphere light up with beautiful golden beams and the skies sparkle. That is not the perfect storm I'm talking about. That's the kind of perfect storm we want. What I'm talking about is this other photo I took just two days later where this is our Nipples programme where water safety and the nippers are sent into the water and the waves are big and it's gray and it's gloomy and it's dark and it's dangerous. Oh, that's why we have heaps of water safety in the water. So, we're talking about a perfect storm, where the disengagement plus the disengagement and the lack of ability of managers to manage performance reviews properly. It's a perfect storm and I'm not talking the beautiful aurora storm I'm talking the grey cloud starts, guys. So, the question is how do we respond? And that's what we're here to talk about. And there's a great comment here that you put here, Guy. He said interestingly, employ a run engagement surveys usually have much higher engagement results than the gullip results would suggest how would you respond to this. Now, thank you for meeting me that far because I was talking to a employer just last week. And they said that their engagement scores are tracking at 54%. So, when you look at individual workplaces, yes, you can see much higher engagement scores. In fact, I was doing the research with Australian Public Sector reports last week as well. And the engagement scores are much, much higher. There are organisations that I've worked with where their engagement scores are 30%. So, I think when you look at the global perspective, you're going to get a slightly different perspective. The other thing that you might challenge on is that maybe it's just totally disengaged people that are answering the survey and that's why it comes out like that. But if you go into the detail of what gullip do, they count for that. So, I do agree with you when you're looking at a single employer and what employers are doing to build their engagement scores. You can definitely see higher scores, which is what we want. But globally, particularly across different regions, that's where we're looking at the global statistics for the headlines. The question we're asking, what I did notice last week when I was talking to this employer is they benchmarking themselves against the global statistics, so they're looking at the statistics and going, well, it's not okay for us to be just better than 21%. What they are focused on is how do they stay in the top 10% of companies that are getting the best engagement? So, that is actually their goal. There's 16% of all of the global workforce that are engaged. How do they ensure as an organisation, they are in the top percentage of organisations that have the highest engagement scores in the company. So, it's a really good way of look at what are the benchmark and how do we stay in the top percentage rather than just languishing at the bottom? So, thank you for jumping in there. Got lots of comments coming here. Thank you. Mere said it is interesting. We get positive feedback, but interesting again. So, Mere, thanks for jumping in here. You said, we get positive feedback, but less than, I just lost the comment, less than 40%, yeah, 40% respond. So, there's two things that we have to get. First of all, we have to get high response rates to be able to really use the statistics, and then we have to then look at what the statistics are. Now, the reason we like Gallup is because it's across hundreds of organisations and thousands and thousands of people are actually responding. Often, with employer running data surveys, people are afraid of retaliation if they give negative feedback. So, thank you for jumping in there, Wendy. So, we're talking to the cultural elements going on here as well. We do know that in some organisations where cultural surveys are broken down to individual areas and individual departments. So, if you look at the Australian Government, the APS cultural surveys, they are broken down by government department and then their rent, and you can actually see which government departments have got the lowest engagement scores. Now, we have worked with Government Department's Board. They have the lower engagement scores and it's a different feel when you walk into that organisation in terms of them receiving the results, what they do with their results, etc. So, yeah, so that fear of retaliation, yeah. It also, it's also the questions they ask. I think the design of the survey has a lot to do with how people respond. Absolutely. And I like your critical thinking there, Guy. So, you know, we use these statistics because it's what's been put in the public arena. And you would have noticed last week, I did say these are headlines statistics. Having said that, we are looking beyond the headline and the clickbait statistics and looking into actually what does it mean. And so, yes, we see that headline, but I go straight into the Australia, Australia and New Zealand statistics. I drilled down on it. I read the whole report, not just the clickbait at the beginning. So, you're right to apply that critical thinking. And we encourage that so that we're looking beyond and also looking at what does it mean from our organisation point of view. We can't just sit back like, well, we've got 75% of that anyone would. So, yeah, thank you for your critical thinking there. Ms says, our organisation uses the E&M's here, which is designed for customers, not employees. I find it quite subjective, but they can't change their minds. Interesting. Yeah. So, it's also like who we're getting that feedback from. There's a lot of work that goes into the different demographics as well. So, I like to look at the demographics in terms of the different demographics in the workplace. So, where is the statistics coming from? Is it the, you know, the 45 to 55 year olds that are mostly disengaged, et cetera, et cetera? So, do we have the perfect storm? That's the question that we're asking. And we have been exposed to workplaces this week where I can tell you there is a perfect storm coming. And there's a lot more that we can do, which is why we're here to have a discussion about this. And this is probably why we throw over to you, Paula. From a coaching point of view, all of those experienced coaches and you MCC will be nodding her head, going, of course, we need to do this, but let's go through it for those people that maybe need to have a bit more of a reflection. We definitely need to move away from some elements when we're in annual performance conversations. And we want to move to a coaching approach. So, Paula, you've been doing performance conversations for ever. They, well, longer than I have actually. Tell us in your perspective, what we need to move away from and what we need to move towards. And sorry, I've used up a lot of our coaching cafe just trying to work through the issues that we have in the workplace at the moment. So, go ahead. You're listening to the Open Door Coaching, Coaching Cafe podcast. And for more information on programs run by Open Door Coaching, head to our website at Open Door Coaching.com.au. Now back to the podcast. Yeah, and look, this is one of my band work. And so, I'm going to try and not be too bandwagony here. And there's very good reasons why performance reviews were put into place. Some of the reasons are great. Some of them are not so great. And when you start linking performance reviews to bonuses and paying creases, it starts changing the reason of why we're actually having the reviews. So, we're talking about engagement. So, if you're talking about how do we have a really engaged workforce, linking performance reviews to remuneration isn't actually going to contribute to that engagement. Even if people get big bonuses because of what happened, if the conversations they're having do not inspire them and they're not coming out of them thinking about, you know, how, what's my future looking like and how good is this going to be? And I'm really enjoying my work and where's my challenge coming from this? The bonus is actually not going to sustain engagement for a long period of time. And one of the other gallup statistics that's in there is that 70% of engagement for people is led by managers. So, if you're having uninspiring conversations with your managers, your engagement is going, their engagement is going to drop. And what generally happens across the board from the experience that I've had is that it's almost like, we start talking about performance reviews and you can almost watch a room full of managers, body language, it drops, they're all of a sudden disengaged. And then they take that disengagement, their own disengagement in the process into the performance review process. And so then the staff members engagement drops and you can see them going, oh, God do this performance review, the managers saying, oh, God do this performance review. And so then it just sort of snowballs from there. The how we talk about this is really important and how manages, how they present it is important. And often this has come from the fact that they've had poor performance review. So, they're passing this poor performance review down the line. So, some of the things we want to move away from. So, it being an annual event, this whole, we're going to ramp up for performance reviews and it's the one time you've got to have a conversation with your staff. This is the bit where we have to move away from, it's an annual event to regular conversations that have dynamic plans that go with them. So, in theory, the performance review, filling in the form bit, should be the 12th conversation if you're having them monthly or if you're having them, fortunately or weekly, it should just be an accumulation of, we've had these really great conversations. Let's take a moment to reflect and look at what we're going to do moving forward as opposed to, it's the one time I've got to say anything or have input into what I'm doing. So, move away from annual, let's keep them regular. Let's make it more of a, it needs to be formal because it is a process, but it's more of a conversation that say continued conversation that got to the 12 month period. It generally comes with a lack of preparation or, you know, so the manager and the person haven't had conversations for the past 12 months and then they suddenly have to remember what they did over a 12 month period. And so, this scrambling for what information should I include in here, and I often find staff in particular forget all the really great things that they've done over the 12 months and they only look at like the last couple of months, did I do something, did this work? Whereas, if you take that really big picture, there's probably heaps that they've contributed, but you've forgotten about it and because it wasn't talked about at the time, it's kind of forgotten. And it's often the, it left to the manager to come up with all the examples, but in actual fact, the team members should be taking responsibility for the great things that they've done and being able to present them and be really proud of the work that they've done. There's definitely a lot of confused years and that happens and we talked about that. It's like the room, everyone's shoulders, the drop and they're all, the sadness comes over and this is driven by the management team. The more enthusiastic you are about these conversations and I'm not talking about Rara, let's have a big party because it's not the way I look at it, but if you have positive language in the way you're speaking about it, then it actually resonates with people. And if you're talking about, you know, what the, what the overall purpose is and how we can use this, how this, that, this conversation that we're going to have is going to look at what have you done over the, what can we be proud of, what have you achieved, what's looking great, where are your strengths lying and then thinking about let's look at moving forward, how do we, how do we continue to utilise these strengths, how do we look at what you're really interested in, what's your stretch, what's your grow going to look like over the next 12 months and breaking it down into chunks that encourage communication and trust and then my favourite of all of these is their unplanned discussions that are often rushed or rescheduled and so a manager, the manager books it in first of all, which I actually think we should be switching this is that the staff member should bind the time and book it into the calendar because there's an ownership piece here I'm taking ownership but then what happens is managers get very busy and they go, oh I can't do this today so I'm just going to reschedule it for weeks time and then it gets rescheduled again and it actually makes that person feel like they are not valued and you can't find the time to have this conversation when I've worked with managers within the workplace this is one of the things that I let them know that it has to be seen as a priority that person's development has to be seen as a priority otherwise it really brings disengagement so we want to move away from rushed, I've seen it so when they go, oh look we'll just take five minutes we'll pull a form in, we'll get out of here in no time because that says so much to that person about how much you value their time and I think it switches back to if you're asking really great coaching questions, if you're using a coaching framework in there it's going to allow that person to present their ideas and their thoughts and they should marry up and then you move forward with what does that look like? So when we're thinking about these performance conversations it's trying to move to a space where the person is valued we're talking about strengths and focusing on what the achievements and what we're being proud of and what does that next 12 months look like? What does that person want and how can we help them with that as opposed to going, oh yeah look it's just something we have to do let's get it done, so the quicker we do this the quicker it's over. Yeah thank you Paul that's a really there's so much in what you've said and it really is a great opportunity to reflect I think as you were talking you know I was thinking about my own practice and so even as experienced coaches and leaders and managers who know all this you probably like me nodding away nodding away going yet at good point but I think the real opportunity is for us all as leaders is is to reflect on what are we doing what are we doing well and with everything that you said how are we doing that well how are we leading and being role models for that? So I really thank you for what you said there Paul are giving us the opportunity to reflect and it occurred to me the reframe but we shouldn't be thinking about performance reviews and performance conversations we should be we should be really talking about development conversations it's our annual development conversation we review how far we've come in our development and where we might be going yes we're reviewing performance there's no doubt about that but maybe there's another opportunity to reframe or do exactly what you said I think in organizations it is about the review and the pay review and I mean they're going to walk out there happy that I've got that pay review or not I suppose to reviewing our performance our development opportunities where we're headed and so I really encourage the very senior experienced people on the line who are listening to this to spend this time that we've got together reflecting on how we're role modeling and how we as leaders can do that better as well so thank you for sharing Paula and as Guy said all managers regardless of who we are needs to realise that the one way to make people feel valued is to give them the gift of your time and I'm heightened in my awareness with everything that we've had on over the last couple months that you know how much time will we give into people different team members and what is that doing for their engagement etc so yeah really good time to be thinking about this so for those of you going all right well we need more than that it's all very well to talk about it what about how we're going to close through this I'm glad you're asked so I want to offer you model which we use for needs analysis but we also use it as performance conversation models and we want to offer you quality questions so this will be on our blog as well but for those of you that can't see it we've got a set of questions that have broken into four categories we're using these questions to actually give us a guide give us some starting points for having a really quality conversation these questions are being implemented into workplaces that we are working with and they are making a difference so the questions start off with proud we're having this annual review let's talk about what we're proud of what's going well what we've achieved what what you're particularly proud of and then as a leader I can say I'm really proud of this work that you've done as well how did you play to your strengths how can we celebrate your achievements now hopefully we've been celebrating those achievements throughout the year but let's have a think about also from an annual point of view how we might celebrate well and if we did celebrate achievements how can we stop and do that let's talk about where you've experienced challenges what's been the impact of those challenges on you what's outstanding so what have we good overcome those challenges which is also the opportunity to reflect an opportunity to celebrate in my opinion and what's to let's stand in in terms of what we need to now focus on my favorite questions are after the proud our questions are all around what are we focusing on the continuous improvement so the third category is improvement what do we want to change or do differently what would be the benefits of the change and also what do you need to learn this year to set you up for those improvements so we're going to build into that performance conversation potentially develop an opportunities it might be any form of learning remembering it doesn't have to just be putting on a training course it can be any form of learning so what are we going to do to improve and then from there most performance conversation models have some form of plan so what are the steps we can take what does the plan look like two months three months six months what resources do you need how can I leverage your strengths how can I support you and in our opinion we want the employee to put that plan together and then a second meeting we come back and we talk about that so the other thing we've noticed in workplaces is that it's the manager doing all the work to put those plans together I even had pushback I was delivering a workshop and I suggested our recommendation is that the employee puts the plan together and someone gave me pushback I don't know they can't because they can't access the system where the only ones that can access the system so where the only ones to put the plan in place and I was like oh oh yeah let's let's let's put the plan in place and then we can enter it into the system if that's needed but we're talking about ownership engagement inspiration here and our coaching questions that we use across the board can have a huge impact so that's what we'd like to offer you a set of questions you can of course use these questions in a range of different contexts they've been tested for cultural a been appropriate culturally they've been tested for cultural safety so we know they work across a range of contexts and they are great conversation starters which is the most important thing so there you go so I follow you on just to say come you with yeah if you're thinking about this there's no reason why you can't ask these questions or similar questions each time you have your one-on-one with people yes of course we we I turned this into a catch-up conversation that managers can have it was an abridged version because they didn't have time for it for all of them necessarily but what if you took one or two questions from each section and that's the conversations you had in one-on-ones how easy would it be when you get to the 12-month part where you have to have your annual performance review that you have already accumulated all this really great information and it makes it so much easier oh absolutely so much to take away from what you've shared with us Paula and a very good reminder thank you about regular a conversation this is the 12th conversation is the thing that's really standing out in what said so thank you very much all right everyone go and inspire your workplaces go and build a occasion score go and make a difference to our thoughts what if they're safe our work place go and go and build the perfect storm that we actually want um you know we're all leaders we're all culture we all have a role to play and and as a community and alumni we truly can make a difference so that's our that's our inspiration to you this morning this afternoon this evening whenever you're listening to our podcast so thank you for joining us of course we've got other statistics which you could pick up on and the statistics do suggest that managers need to be trained so our certificate for a work place in business coaching and a employment leadership coaching it's end of financial year please send your money our way we will gladly receive it and together we can make a difference so thank you everyone for joining us all this afternoon thanks for listening to this episode of the coaching cafe podcast you can watch the full video of this podcast on our website i'll put a link in the show notes we'll see you at the next coaching cafe