Read on to learn why frequent evaluations are more effective.

Unless you have a psychic working for you, your employees don’t know what you’re thinking. If you want them to change their behavior, don’t wait until the yearly performance review to do so.

Your employees want to succeed. They won’t if you don’t give them the critique they need to improve. No one wants to hear that they’ve been fired for something that was correctable, if only the boss had made mention of it.

When you wait until the employee review period to assess performance, you’re taking away an employee’s accountability. He or she can claim ignorance of mistakes because the manager didn’t inform the worker that he or she was doing something wrong.

Everyone should be held accountable at a company. And an employee can’t claim responsibility for his or her behavior if that individual was operating under the impression that it was acceptable. The sooner the employee knows that there’s a problem to be fixed, the sooner he or she can own it and take care of it.

Psychologists have come up with a term they’ve dubbed “the recency effect.” It refers to humans’ tendency to base their analysis of a long time period on the most recent event they’ve experienced. For example, a boss might only look at an employee’s mistake on a report last month during a performance review instead of considering the two amazing projects he completed ten months ago.

You might not remember to tell your employees that they did a great job back in February if it’s now August. Instead of waiting, give them the feedback (be it positive or negative) now, when it’s fresh in your mind.

Investing in 360 review software will help you develop your employees in ways that you never thought possible. Knowing this, however, is just the first step; finding the right tool to use can be daunting.

Grapevine Evaluations has the solution you need: web-based, customizable templates that provide comprehensive reporting. Take a tour of our product, or learn more from us one-on-one, and find out why we’ve helped countless large and small companies gain a solid understanding of the value of their employees.