Personally or professionally, regular follow-ups are a way of life, and essential to everyone’s development. With phone calls lately being an integral part of business communication, and the inability to meet in person, the way review calls are handled can make or break your relationship with your employees.

Let it happen enough times, and the business will start to suffer. Managing a review call isn’t just about being effective and efficient, it’s to approach it with more in mind than just a regular performance appraisal. You can do so in nine steps.

Find What Works For Your Team

Implementing a new employee performance review strategy is a start to helping your employees grow and flourish in your company. Studies showed more than more than half of office professionals want performance check-ins at least once a month.

Of these,94% would prefer their manager to address mistakes and opportunities to improve in real-time. Knowing exactly what the team wishes to discuss besides the usual agenda and tailoring to the same is essential.

Ask probing questions

Yes. No. Okay. Your review calls cannot be as simple as that Asking effective questions isn’t always easy, but what you ask (or don’t ask thereof) can have a major impact on the efficacy of your review calls. Bearing this in mind, the following aspects are to be avoided for asking questions.

• Leading on the team :“You already took care of the campaign audience, right?”
• Multiple choice questions / Multiple questions: “Did you change the campaign audience last week, last month or has it been even longer? Do you know if it was effective? Has anyone else responded to it recently?”
• Rambling on : “Have you ever changed the campaign audience? You know, you really need to change the targets every month, maybe more depending on the social media activity. I knew this company that…”

The examples given may seem conversational and harmless, but in a professional context, they bring in unnecessary variables that may confuse the team.  A more direct “When was the campaign audience last changed?” would have done the job.

Review calls can be improved when you ask direct, deliberate questions that result in useful answers. And of course, be comfortable remaining silent and actively listen  while you get a response.

With the right tools, ensuring effectiveness here can be done. One such tool for this context would be MultiCall, One such tool to help you with this case is MultiCall, a group calling app dedicated to let you call many with the ease of calling one. Its Call Monitoring system lets you mute the participants if need be, as one person talks.

Keep the conversation balanced.

Relationships on any level involves a give and take. A useful conversation requires that too. The review call is only as effective as equal portions of give and take. If you do all of the talking, you won’t get your team’s input. But if you’re doing all of the listening, then you’re not asking the questions necessary to draw insights from what the team may have in mind 

Managing the review calls means to understand and learn the team’s pain points, and communicate your value proposition effectively. In the process, you have to keep the conversation balanced.

Be sure to give them time to answer before asking your next question. If the team feels like you’ve run down the conversation, interest in working with you any further will be unlikely.

Ask follow-up questions.

Asking your questions and listening to the answers is important. While you shouldn’t interrupt, you shouldn’t hesitate to ask follow-up questions if you require more information on any aspect.

Follow-up questions are also useful in being able to guide the conversation, especially when dealing with a team with all members wanting to say or ask something. In other cases however, the hesitation may stem from the potential embarrassment of asking what may seem a “stupid” question. This can be enough to keep them quiet entirely.

Besides upping the review call’s efficacy, asking follow-up questions also shows you’re listening, and that you care about building a long lasting relationship

Repeat, Rephrase and Clarify 

When air traffic control provides a direction and/or an altitude to an aircraft, the pilots read this back to them. This readback is done to ensure that their understanding correct. This same technique can work wonders when working review calls with your team.

No matter how hard you listen during a call, there’s always the possibility of a misunderstanding. Maybe someone in the team gave an unclear or complicated answer, or maybe you just misheard something in the response. Repeating the answer back to the members allows you to clarify the information and keep it from becoming a problem.

Know how to use your phone.

Not knowing how to mute the phone, or add another contact to the call, or transferring a call to another number can spell disaster with regard to the review calls efficiency.

Luckily, the usage of MultiCall is straightforward enough! Here’s everything you need to know about how to let it help you optimize your review call with the team. You can also check the tutorials in the settings of the app as well!

Send a follow-up email to recap the call.

Odd as it may sound, yes…the follow-up call itself needs a follow-up! After the call, it’s necessary to put together the highlights of the conversation, along with any pending items that require to be followed up.

But remember, the purpose of this isn’t just some minutes of the meeting script. It’s rather to clearly recognize everyone’s individual involvement in the team effort, and to recap the major talking points for later reference.

A clear recap email will improve your follow-up calls and keep the conversation going in a productive and useful way.

Give Praise

It’s one thing that managers need to commit to progressing in their work goals toward a plan. But simply this is not enough;  progress must also be also apprised to everyone who is involved. Providing feedback and recognizing employees for their hard work during the call is one way to provide such updates. 

Positive feedback boosts confidence, and shows people you value them. It helps people to understand and develop their skills. Most of all, it helps motivate them on call, which makes it integral to a remote team culture.

Recur

Happiness is another factor that influences turnover. As such, managers should focus on employee satisfaction. Salary and benefits play a big part in employee satisfaction, but an overall work environment can improve satisfaction, too.

Employees need to have clarity around what they do for their day-to-day tasks, and they need to clearly understand how those tasks are evaluated. A lack of clarity can potentially lead to confusion, in turn leading to stress and disengagement.

Review calls therefore need to be recurring, and not just one-off events every now and then. MultiCall’s Call Scheduling’s setting can help you set this. Same time, every week!

With the steps previously mentioned complemented by the right tool, the weekly review calls can be managed much more effectively in order to allow the company to reach greater levels of productivity and output.