Reviews are a time to reflect together with your employees on their strengths and areas of growth. It’s also the time where you can work with them on goals for the next year. Reviews do not need to be cumbersome, and should never be fear-inducing. Feedback should be regular and transparent.

Don’t have a robust performance review model in place yet? No worries! Here are a few simple questions to work through with your team members!

• What went well this year - go over main work and major projects

• What needs improvement - be clear, be specific.

• How will I help you achieve those improvements - commit has a leader to help them grow

• What could I have done to make your work easier/more efficient? Where was I a blocker?

• Was there anyone else working on projects with you that helped make things easier that you would like to call out

Many companies have stepped away from bonuses to ensure a clearer view of budgets along with a desire to provide their employees the money they are earning throughout the year. If you are an organization that still offers bonuses, then end of year is when your employees will be expecting it.

When giving out bonuses there’s a little more work than just handing out checks!

• Ensure you can clearly show each employee receiving a bonus what the bonus is linked to. Personal Performance can be linked to their reviews, but cannot be subjective. If it’s linked to company performance you need to show what is was and how you got to the calculation.

• If the bonus is strictly a free cash “treat” tell the team that. “We feel so fortunate to have had a great year thanks to everyones hard work, and while we don’t have a formal bonus plan, and we may not always be able to do this, today we can and so we will”

• If you need an employee to sign a new employment contract this is a great time as bonuses are considered consideration (helping to make the contract binding).

• Track your bonuses - make sure your HRIS (or even just a spreadsheet) is tracking bonuses paid out by employee. You’ll need to look at it again YOY.

Options

Many people join early stage companies for the upside and they would much prefer more options YOY than additional cash (especially if they are already paid fairly). Offering options is a great way to show someone that they count in the company’s success and keep cash in the bank.

Having an Option schedule for promotions, anniversaries and work that truly goes above and beyond is a great tool as well.

Promotions don’t have to happen at the end of the year, they should be happening when the right role is open and the right person is ready.

So, if they happen at year end that’s just extra nice because you can start off the New Year on a high note with the employee.

Year End is a great time to have promotion conversations with your top players that will likely be promoted early in the New Year. Align as a leadership team on who these players are, agree on them, and then talk to them. Chat about what you need to see for this to come to fruition and what timelines are likely to look like.

This is an incredible retention tool as it gets employees excited for the future and not getting the New Years blues and starting to explore new roles!

November/December is your time for Workforce Planning. You don’t need to be too extensive when you’re still small but you do need to do some planning. Payroll is your biggest line item and will wipe out your runway if you’re not paying attention. Layoffs are costly both to your bank account and your culture. Workforce planning, even high level will help mitigate a lot of risk

Looking at your

• Runway vs Hiring Plan - will offer insight into changes you may need to make

• Needs vs Wants - separating out needs and wants from hiring to real estate, events and programs to ensure the most important things happen first

• Cost of living increase impact to payroll - raises don’t always line up with YE but more often than note COL increases do. Following the Bank of Canada/Federal Reserve Bank index will likely keep you in line with the majority of your competitors.

All of these activities will help your leadership team understand the impact of each decision they make and align as a group heading into the New Year.