Elevate Peer Review: Best Practices for a Productive Workplace

What is peer review?

A peer review at work is a process that involves co-workers rating each other's work performances. In this basically the supervisor creates a peer review form for everyone at the workplace to anonymously fill out about their co-workers at the workplace. It gives you the chance to share your honest reviews about your coworkers since the form remains anonymous. It is important though to keep in mind that your manager or the supervisor will be able to see these documents, so maintain a professional and polite tone while filling your thoughts in the form.

Best practices to adopt for a peer review at the work

Peer reviews are meant to provide valuable insights about the employees' skills, productivity, morale, and personality to the  management, provided it is done correctly. Let us discuss in brief tips that can help manage and adopt best practices for peer review at the workplace to achieve the best outcomes -

• Maintaining complete anonymity 

Maintaining the anonymity of the peer review system is one of the most important parts. It is advisable to consider doing online peer reviews since colleagues may know each other's handwriting. Having known the fact that a person’s identity will not be revealed at any point, actually gives people the freedom to be honest and open about their feelings toward their coworkers. 

• Review the document well before releasing

To ensure the fact that the feedback from each employee is helpful it is important that the review forms are properly checked before releasing or distributing them. Also, ensure that in the peer review process, co-workers are giving each other additional feedback and plenty of praise that will ultimately leave room for only great outcomes. 

• Outline expectations

Make sure to clearly outline your expectations for this exercise before your employees fill out their peer review forms. Let them know that the sole purpose of peer reviews is to help each other grow and become their best professional selves, so remind your team that praising is always important and helpful besides including criticisms. Making people aware of what they are doing well will actually boost their confidence and morale alongside feeling more committed to their work.

• Leave room for actual written feedback

Actual written feedback is much more helpful than the numerical scores. The peer review forms mostly include a Likert scale for systematic reviews, where employees can divulge their thoughts by ranking their co-worker’s efforts on a five- or seven-point scale. Though these number scales are always very helpful, written thoughts and opinions are the best ones that help with real actions.

• Meeting employees one-on-one basis

Meet with each employee for a one-on-one performance review after everyone has a chance to read through their peer reviews. You can also share your own thoughts in the meeting about their performances and use this meeting as an opportunity to find out each employee's strengths and weaknesses. This will help you understand your employees better as a manager and come up with goals to keep moving forward.

Benefits of peer review

• A formal review will help managers find out an employee's true strengths and weaknesses. This will help managers in organisations set up training and development programs that will help improve specific skills that each employee needs.

• Peer reviews at the workplace will also prove beneficial for managers to discover hidden talent. For instance, they will be able to figure out the quiet performers who regularly generate exceptional work without any recognition.

• The feedback from the peer reviews can help employees understand how they are doing and where they need to improve thus helping them shape their better selves.

Final Thoughts 

Administered and implemented correctly, peer reviews can provide insights that are very crucial to be discovered. Peer reviews are very helpful for jobs in organisations of every sector, even jobs in the education sector can include the peer review process to encourage them to become the best professional versions of themselves.