How to design a strong performance process

When I started out in UX, no one ever explained how pay or progression decisions were made. My first review cycle was completely opaque.

Managers were left to drive performance, while pay and promotion decisions happened behind closed doors with HR.

Despite that lack of clarity, I wasn't concerned. I trusted my manager because we reviewed my work and priorities every two weeks. In our 1:1s, we connected my career goals to business needs, identified stretch opportunities, and reviewed progress in quarterly retrospectives.

Later in my career, even though I worked in People Experience with visibility into pay & promotion decisions and the structured performance process that sat behind it, I didn’t trust the process. My HR manager was setting goals that were either too vague or unrealistic, and took little time to understand and align on my work.

At that company, I began to notice a culture of people spending less time on good work and more time protecting themselves.

I see this everywhere now: when performance processes don’t feel fair, people focus on playing the system instead of delivering value.

What’s more important than designing a clear performance process, is designing a strong performance experience.

The Business Case for a People-First Performance Experience

The most reliable way to drive business value through performance is to start with your people.

Research by Gallup shows that organisations with engaged employees see higher productivity and profitability, alongside lower absenteeism and turnover. Engagement changes how people show up to their work. They put in more discretionary effort, take more ownership, and perform at a higher level.

That engagement is shaped largely by the manager relationship. Employees who spend more time in meaningful conversations with their manager are more innovative and more likely to thrive, especially when managers show empathy and genuine investment in their success.

That is why, to build high-performing teams, we need to move beyond building complete systems and toward designing better experiences. When managers build trust through regular, genuine conversations, performance processes start to work as intended. When they don’t, even the most sophisticated system will fail.

How to build a strong performance experience

Step 1: Co-create with Leadership

A common mistake I see is HR buying a performance tool and letting the software dictate how goals, feedback, and reviews are handled day-to-day. In this scenario leaders end up chasing people to complete forms that don’t help them do their jobs.

The alternative is to co-design your performance experience with the people expected to use it, and avoid building it all at once. This is more of a pull approach where your leaders and people actually value the process.

My recommendation is to start by bringing your leadership team together, not to design a process, but to agree on the experience you want to create that will align teams and drive results.

Facilitate a discussion for the leadership team on how they expect to:

• 🎯 Align on goals: What questions can we ask to ensure everyone is pulling in the same direction?
• 📏 Measure success: What actually counts as a "win" here? Are we still winning if we hit the goal but everyone still burns out in the process?
• 👏 Review and celebrate: How will we know that our environment and skills are setting us up for success? How will we recognise our achievements?
• 💬 Give & act on feedback: How should we discuss what’s working and what’s not?

By agreeing on how to have meaningful discussions about performance as a leadership team (and how often) you increase the chances that these behaviours will be modelled consistently across the organisation.

Only after you have an idea of the actions and conversations that will build strong manager & employee relationships, should you think about which software or tool will enable the experience you’re trying to create.

Step 2: test, learn & iterate with teams

Once you’ve aligned with the leadership team, the temptation is to build the process for everyone and roll it out. Don’t.

Instead, ask each leader to take that same co-design activity back to their own departments. The goal here is to gather insight from the layer below and test whether leadership assumptions hold up. Ultimately, most likely, a one-size approach won't fit every team's needs (which means the software supporting your processes will need to allow for variation).

This approach builds buy-in quickly and surfaces cultural patterns no software tool can fix such as teams avoiding upward feedback or managers consistently deprioritising 1:1s.

By gathering this bottom-up insight, you can refine your performance framework before it’s set in stone. You end up with a process people use willingly, because they shaped it.

Design the experience first.

When performance is dropping, instead of jumping immediately into build (or rebuilding) an entire performance process, explore first which parts of the experience of being managed feel unsupportive, inconsistent or unfair.

One of the reasons I was excited about collaborating with Mark on this newsletter for Crewmojo is because our philosophies align on taking an experience-first approach.

We agree that clear systems matter, but that they can't replace the quality of the relationships between managers and employees, or the consistency of the conversations they have.

Last year, Crewmojo decided to redesign their performance management software to allow organisations to design the performance experience and then create workflows that enable it. The strongest performance experiences are built gradually. They start with shared expectations, are shaped through real conversations, and are refined based on how people actually work, not how a tool expects them to.

Rather than forcing managers and employees to use separate modules for goals, feedback, 1:1s and surveys etc, Crewmojo focuses on enabling managers to build strong relationships with employees through meaningful interactions. The result is that people can focus on doing good work instead of directing energy toward protecting themselves and managing a system.

Let trust, clarity, and manager capability lead. Only then should software enter the picture.

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