If you’re like me, it feels borderline preposterous to think about performance reviews right now. We’re going to talk about it anyway.

If you don’t already have them in place, it may feel silly to create a formal evaluation rubric and review process, particularly for small or especially close-knit teams; you might feel like you know good work when you see it, and you’re confident in giving developmental/corrective feedback when it’s needed. It’s easy to deprioritize creating an evaluation rubric for a new role; I’ve been known to procrastinate on creating an evaluation rubric for senior-level employees for an embarrassingly long time. (I still do performance reviews on time, though!) It’s one of those things that rarely makes it to the “urgent” corner of our attention. If you can bring it to that corner now, you’ll have time to make thoughtful and impactful changes before the end of the year.

If you’re looking for details about what to include in a performance review, Alison Greene and Jerry Hauser’s book Managing to Change the World has a great overview of the logistics that go into setting up performance reviews, including a sample evaluation rubric. Here, I want to go a bit deeper into why they’re important for effective and equitable teams:

Evaluation rubrics help to create clarity around what’s expected of an employee, especially when they’re introduced to the employee outside the context of their first performance evaluation. Even in a highly communicative, collaborative team setting, until you codify the expectations of the role and how you’ll tell if someone’s doing well at it, your direct reports will be guessing about whether they’re meeting expectations, and that takes mental and emotional energy away from actually doing the job.

Having your expectations and evaluation points codified also gives you a basis for addressing performance issues before they arise. Conversations about significant performance problems are already difficult; they’re easier if you can point to a shared expectation about how the job performance will be assessed, rather than needing to first come to a consensus about whether that performance should be acceptable.

Having an evaluation rubric for senior or management roles can also facilitate conversations about career growth with a more junior employee, and help you make better promotion decisions in the future. Rather than simply promoting the person with the longest tenure or the most effective individual contributor, you’ll be able to point to specific skill sets that are required at the next level and help the employee to focus on developing those skill sets. Establishing those shared expectations across the board helps you identify and mitigate the impact of unconscious bias on your assessment of your employees – setting you up for a more equitable and effective team in the long run.