The Best Questions To Ask Your Marketing Team During Performance Reviews

Hosting a performance review is a test of diligence - senior leaders must eschew subjectivity and focus on raw data to analyze their staff in the fairest and most objective way possible. But is that really the goal of performance analysis in a post-pandemic world, where the nature and meaning of work have completely changed?

The humble performance review has gone through a seismic shift in the last few years to keep abreast of changing attitudes to work, career development, and corporate growth and resilience. 
Gone are the days of the annual assessment, which, when poorly executed, was always a desultory effort to acknowledge the hard work and commitment of employees. 

Now, we live in the age of continual performance review - a corporate and enterprise culture of assessment that follows iterative practices, that are hyper-personalized, and built around empathic leadership and targeted goal setting on a much more frequent basis.

For marketers - those customer-facing, agile, communicative, and brand-obsessed professionals that manage almost every service touchpoint of your company - performance reviews need to be effective at highlighting and summarizing both the company and employee performance against the one, true metric - customer engagement and effectiveness in the age of COVID. 

Never has brand communications and trust been more important. While this is not dissimilar to previous years, the fact we’re now 2 years into a pandemic should give you pause - how you package your performance review needs to factor in the shifts in company revenue, customer profile, company success, and employee expectations and happiness as a result of COVID-19. 

It’s the ultimate performance elephant in the room, and while both staff and managers will want to discuss employee successes and company positivity, COVID casts a long shadow. So be mindful: context is everything. 

So what top-line performance review questions need to be asked?

What are your most important goals for the coming 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months?

Rather than focus on long-term goals only, our advice is to segment the coming year into packets - in effect, mirroring the sort of review you’d give a new staff member on probation. 

This will give you an indication of how your staff member sees their near future and long term position in sequence - and, given the changes to public health guidance state-by-state and the continuing legacy of COVID related changes to work and socializing, you’ll be giving your marketing employee the chance to consider their working and living context, and their role in light of it. 

In effect, you’re giving your staff member the chance to review their entire holistic output - how they work, why they work, how they see their labor fitting into their overall short and medium-term, and how this matches long-term career goals. 

How could I be more helpful to you?

This is probably the most important question you can ask your employee. 

Marketers are collaborative in nature and need to constantly and consistently filter creative and brand messaging to the wider public, press, internal staff, and stakeholders. This means collaboration with management has to be trusted, smooth running, and iterative. 

You need to be a receptive manager. Give your marketing team the chance to objectively review your stewarding of their career to date, and see what ideas they have about how you could help them achieve their goals. 

Remember - your staff has, in the main, limited knowledge about what sort of resources you have to give them to develop their skills, and often won’t ask for fear of rocking the boat or overreaching. Give them the chance to speak freely about what they want, and how you can help. This sort of positive career handling is incredibly valuable and can act as staff retention fuel, especially to younger workers and Gen Z professionals. 

What do you feel went well these past 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months, and what might have gone better?

Self-reflection is a mature and highly regarded asset to the staff, especially ones who deal in customer or consumer engagement. Marketing professionals also often require clear-cut metrics on how effective their marketing is. 

Their self-reflection should mirror these two facets together - allow your team the opportunity to evaluate their own performance in light of the above 3, 6, and 12-month structure, and allow them to qualify it in the context of COVID-19 and any changes you have made as a result of it plus allow them to qualify what metrics tell that story.

What do you feel are going to be the main changes or challenges for our business this year?

Some objective reflection works wonders on your staff’s engagement with you, and allowing them to wax lyrical about the future of your company (and how you will all ride the wave of challenges together), will give you an incredibly clear image of their view of your company, and their engagement with your marketing plan, wider team, and ethos. A simple yet necessary line of questioning.

Which job responsibilities/tasks do you enjoy most? Which do you least enjoy?

The most subjective question in the performance review handbook, but again it's a guaranteed way to get into the mind of your employee. 

Performance reviews are meant to be safe places for your staff to converse about their role, the good and the bad. While there are behaviors that are acceptable and unacceptable in such a meeting, your team needs to be able to “air” their strengths and weaknesses knowing full well the information will be used to improve them, not hamper them or disregard them for promotion or development. 

What type of career growth is most important to you?

Finally, asking your employee what type of career growth is important to you is flipping the review script. Allowing your teams the chance to share their career goals allows you to align your performance analysis with tangible outcomes that match their expectations. 

Outcomes and Summary

You’ll notice we didn’t focus on work processes in the above list, such as asking after remote practices and engagement. While those conversations are important, you should be asking those every week, every day, if possible. That sort of analysis is bread and butter daily management. 

Performance reviews look at the purpose, drivers, and passions behind the day-to-day.

There are literally hundreds of questions you could level at an employee in a performance review. But focusing on context, personalizing your approach, and definitive, subjective outcomes is a surefire way of creating a thriving marketing culture that values, above all else, the power of the individual to take control of their career.