YEAR END PERFORMANCE REVIEW: How To Prepare, Prove Your Worth & Get The Salary Raise You Deserve

It’s the end of the year already and you know what that means… PERFORMANCE REVIEWS! Dun dun dun!

Are you going to be celebrating, buzzing from a super-positive year-end review and salary bump to boot? Or are you dreading that awkward moment of (finally) receiving feedback from your manager?

If you want to wrap up your professional year with a BANG 💥 then you need to get prepared!  

Here are some tips:

1. BUILD YOUR BRAG BANK: Identify all of your “wins” this year. All are welcome, from increased sales to strategic relationships being formed. Quantify them or at least explain their impact on business results.

2. GATHER FEEDBACK: Create a short feedback survey on a free site like Typeform and ask teammates, customers (internal, external), direct reports and so on for feedback on working with you. Imagine being able to walk in and say “I’ve conducted a survey of my customers and over 90% of them gave me a 5-star rating on my ability to solve problems”!

3. DEMONSTRATE PERFORMANCE: Link what you’ve learned back to your performance objectives. Have you met them? Exceeded them? If you haven’t reached a particular objective, what got in the way, what did you try to overcome this, and what else did you do instead that yielded positive results?

4. DEMONSTRATE POTENTIAL: Theme your brag bank and feedback up and link it to your company’s leadership competencies (ask your HR if you don’t know what these are) and company values. If your company’s leadership competencies are things like “Takes Initiative” or “Collaborates effectively”, find the relevant examples.

5. BE FUTURE FOCUSSED: Yes, you’ll review your past performance. But don't forget to show off your strategic thinking by preparing a vision for next year, what you hope to achieve and what success looks like for you. This helps with your salary discussion because you can argue that you’ll be getting paid to deliver a WHOLE LOT MORE next year.

6. DO YOUR SALARY RESEARCH: Firstly, use sites like Glassdoor, Payscale, Hays and good ol’ Google to benchmark your salary. Secondly, book a 1:1 with your HR and ask if they can provide any information pertaining to your salary band - where are you at on the band for your role? If you’re at 80%, do you think that’s fair? If you get a performance rating of “meets expectations” that means you’re performing at 100% of the job specs, so you should be at 100% of the band.

Bonus tip: Try to translate your next year’s deliverables into dollar figures wherever possible e.g. “My goal is to increase website traffic by 20%, resulting in 20% more sales and therefore $X.” It will show how much value you will create, making your salary bump a mere drop in the ocean!

Whatever happens, I’m over here rooting for you!

Good luck & stay badass,

Rosie