9 Box Performance Review: Worth the Hype?

Can putting your employees in a box help evaluate performance?

McKinsey developed the 9 box performance review system as a tool for managers. It has since evolved into a widely used tool for HR departments to:

• Determine the strength of their talent pool.
• Allocate resources.
• Evaluate the career paths within the company. 

Like all other performance review systems, the 9 box grid has pros and cons. 

By the end of this article, you'll: 

• Know whether the 9 box performance review suits your team, given its pros and cons. 
• Its potential impact on your talent management strategy.
• Whether you should turn to other methods for performance evaluation, such as 360 performance reviews and balanced scorecards.

📈 What is a 9 box performance review?

A 9 box performance review is a system for evaluating employees' performance and potential. It is a type of employee appraisal looking at current performance and future potential.

The 9-box grid is divided into three levels of performance (low, medium, and high) and three levels of potential (low, medium, and high), resulting in nine combinations.

The bottom left box means low performance and low potential, while the top right denotes high performance and high potential. 

Managers place employees into one of these boxes based on their performance review results and perceived potential for future growth.

One would think that ideally, an employer would want all the employees in the top right box – high performance and high potential. 

However, it's important to remember that those people (commonly called all-stars) are hungry for promotion. Hence, you need to have senior positions available. 

Because of that, it could be better to have a mix between all-stars and high-performers with average potential, known as core players.

The nine categories are:

• Low performance, low potential: Bad hires
• Low performance, average potential: Up or out dilemmas
• Low performance, high potential: Rough diamonds
• Medium performance, low potential: Up or out grinders
• High performance, low potential: Workhorses
• Medium performance, medium potential: Core players
• High performance, medium potential: High performers
• Medium performance, high potential: High potentials
• High performance, high potential: All stars 

At the extremes, we find bad hires and all-stars.

Bad hires may sound harsh, but they give you feedback on where you need to improve the recruitment process. You usually want to invest less in these employees since other hires offer a greater return on investment.

Having low performance and low potential, they usually drag down the team through: 

• their performance, which requires that other team members clean up the mess;  
• their morale. 

However, you may also want to examine why they have low performance and low potential. There may be a deeper personal challenge going on that you're unaware of.

The all-stars are the future leaders of your organization: 

• They are the people you want to invest in the most. 
• They are outperforming and eager to be promoted, so it's important to identify clear growth paths and invest in their evolution.

The hires with moderate performance and moderate potential are your core players.

🚨 It's essential to evaluate performance as part of a more extensive performance management system. Such a management system also incorporates learning and development.

For example, it's natural that an employee who has not received the appropriate training evolves slower than someone trained recently.

🙌 Pros of using the 9 box grid for performance evaluation

What are the pros of using the 9 box grid for performance evaluation? 

• It is a standardized way of evaluating an employee in their current role. Standardized evaluations make it easier to compare employees than, e.g., written comments. 
• It simplifies the identification of high-potential employees and potential leaders. When someone has a high growth potential, you'd want to ensure there's a logical next step within the organization not to lose the employee to a competitor.  
• If your company applies budgets proportional to the individual performance scores, the 9 box grid helps guide the distribution of funds. For example, a moderate performer would receive less training than a high performer. 
• It leads to improved succession planning. 

💡 For more in-depth info, check out our article on how to use the 9 box grid for succession planning.

The 9 box performance review can encourage employee development. Employee development takes a more long-term perspective on the employee's growth within the organization. Read more about employee development programs in our article. 

🙅 Cons of using the 9 box grid for performance evaluation

Oversimplification of employee performance

Employee performance is a complex topic. It's a challenge to find the sweet spot: 

• On the one hand, being too detailed in the evaluations risks losing objectivity.
• Meanwhile, being too shallow means losing accuracy. 

While the traditional 9 box performance uses nine boxes, some organizations use 16 boxes to challenge the managers to choose either above or below average.

Potential for bias

Unconscious bias can give privileged groups an unfair advantage in the workplace and performance evaluations. 

For example, managers might perceive employees who are extroverted or express enthusiasm about their work as higher performers than their quiet colleagues. But being outspoken does not equate to higher performance. 

Limitations in addressing unique employee situations

Labeling someone as a "bad hire" can be accurate from a performance and potential perspective. Yet it fails to see the human and the reasons behind their behavior. 

For example, an ordinarily high-performing individual can get distracted if they struggle with personal challenges of which their manager is unaware. Therefore, before jumping to conclusions and assuming it's related to low morale, it is essential to examine the factors behind a "bad hire." 

Difficulties in accurately assessing potential

Accurately assessing potential is particularly questionable when a single manager does the evaluation and ranking. 

Often, managers don't have complete insight into the daily performance of each individual. For this reason, many companies have switched to 360 reviews, where each employee gets peer input and feedback from the team lead and manager. 

This type of evaluation paints a more accurate and fair picture of each person.

Risk of demotivating employees

No one wants to be a bad hire or end up in the lower categories. Plus, everyone takes criticism in their own way:

• High performers may get fired up from constructive feedback.
• Low performers may get disheartened and tempted to give up. 
• Someone might be a high performer with low potential. Since their morale is high and they're putting their best foot forward, they could feel demotivated from knowing the company doesn't see potential in them.

To mitigate these drawbacks, some companies only share the performance score, not the potential score, with their employees.

🏆 6 Best practices for using the 9 box grid for performance management

If you have weighed the pros and cons and concluded that the 9 box performance review is the way to go, the question remains: how can you get the most out of this model?

A. Establish clear evaluation criteria and method

The manager must know what's intended by low, medium, and high performance – and potential. The exact criteria come down to your company values, resources, and the roles evaluated. 

Tip: Zavvy's performance review software lets you design performance reviews according to your needs. 

B. Train managers on effective usage

Another key is to train the leadership team and mid-level managers to use the 9 box grid. 

The meaning of "potential" and "performance" can seem like common sense but can be interpreted differently, leading to inconsistent evaluations among managers. 

Tip: Get clear on what each box represents for your organization, and keep updated documentation for your managers to consult. 

The second part of the 9 box performance review is to create an action plan for each employee depending on their score. 

Are you rewarding high-performing employees regularly? 

And creating plans for those with performance issues? 

C. Regularly review and update the process

As your people grow, your processes need to follow suit. Therefore, before each evaluation, revise the criteria for each of the nine boxes. 

Are you properly assessing the growth potential of each employee? 

Have your employees received training and development so that the performance expectations have changed?

Are your managers aware of changes to performance criteria?

Those are some questions to check that your 9 box performance review framework is up-to-date.

D. Incorporate employee feedback

As mentioned, managers usually lack granular insight into the daily performance of an employee. 

To give more well-rounded feedback, you can include peer feedback in the performance evaluation step that helps determine in what box the employee will be placed. 

This addition will create a hybrid between 360 feedback and 9 box performance review.

E. Ensure confidentiality and transparency

Typically, the 9 box performance review results stay between the manager and the employee. Employees may be more comfortable discussing their results privately with the manager than during a team meeting. 

Transparency means taking inventory and looking into talent management practices that can have caused a person to end up in one of the lower boxes.

How can I minimize bias and ensure fairness using the 9 box performance review? 

When assessing performance to determine in which of the 9 boxes your employee will fit, focus on performance management over pure KPI measurement. While the latter only compares employee results with goals, performance management takes a broader stance and includes aspects like:

• feedback;
• action plans;
• providing employees with the tools they need to evolve.

Awareness is the first step to change, but it is not enough. 

With proper leadership training, your managers will be aware of the detrimental role of unconscious bias and how to avoid unfair assessments.

Tip: Calibration meetings are another great way for managers to get together with their peers and discuss potential biases and definitions of organizational performance. 

🕵️‍♀️ 4 Alternatives to the 9 box grid performance review

As we have seen, the 9 box performance review has its advantages – such as simplicity. But that can come at the cost of accuracy. And since performance reviews play a huge role in employee enablement and motivation, it is worth finding the optimal option for your team. 

Continuous performance management (and feedback)

A 9 box performance review typically takes place once or twice a year. That means that between evaluations, the employee doesn't get feedback. Let's say they improve drastically the week following an evaluation. They won't get positive feedback – and management might not consider them for a promotion – until almost a year later.

With continuous employee feedback, you'd assess performance continuously, which is fairer and increases motivation to improve immediately.

🔬 Check a more in-detail discussion of Performance Review vs. Continuous Feedback. We'll help you find the best approach for your team, which could mean combining both methods. 

360-Degree performance reviews

A 360 perspective on the review process means everyone evaluates everyone. 

More specifically, employees receive reviews from teammates, team lead, and manager. Multi-rater evaluations make for more well-rounded feedback less sensitive to bias and the employee's relationship with the manager. 

With a 360-degree performance review, the information comes from reviewers across the organizational hierarchy. (Outliers can be removed to paint an accurate picture.)

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a goal-setting and performance management framework that focuses on setting, tracking, and achieving ambitious objectives.

OKRs are a key element for how employee performance reviews at Google are done.

At the beginning of each quarter, the top executives set goals for the company for the coming three months. It helps each employee see the priorities for the coming period and how their individual tasks can contribute to reaching those goals. It is a positive and forward-thinking method that spurs motivation. 

At Google, OKRs need to be challenging: 

• Reaching 70% of the goals is considered good.
•  Reaching 100% is regarded as a "failure, " meaning the executive team must set more ambitious goals in the coming period. 

The intent is to use stretch goals as a carrot for future growth.

OKRs offer a more dynamic, goal-oriented alternative to the 9-box performance review, focusing on setting and achieving ambitious objectives that align with the organization's mission and strategy.

By implementing OKRs, organizations can promote transparency, collaboration, and continuous improvement in their performance management processes.

Employee scorecard

An employee scorecard is another method of evaluating employee performance. This is done by looking at different metrics and rating them, usually between 1 and 5. 

The qualities reviewed belong to one of these categories: performance, development, and values. 

A scorecard is easy to review regularly. It serves as the foundation for action plans for improving performance.

Plus, it gives a detailed assessment of performance broken down into different areas, making it easy to see what to focus on since there are many factors behind performance.

➡️ Enable potential and performance with Zavvy

Ultimately, it's up to you to decide if the 9 box grid is right for your organization to reach employee performance goals. 

With Zavvy, you can easily adapt our performance review software to your unique needs. 

Thanks to the built-in feature feedback analytics, you can easily enable a 9-box grid on Zavvy. 

The best part about it is that you have full customization power:

• You can also customize the 9 box grid and evolve it into 16 boxes or whatever suits your organization. 
• And you can edit the rating scales in the 9 box template.
• You can fully customize the X and Y axes of your 9 box grid (with questions from peers, managers, or self-evaluations).

What's great about Zavvy is that we offer follow-up solutions to actually manage performance and not stop at simply evaluating it.

🌱 Our employee development software helps you create career growth plans for leaders and individual contributors. Your employees can also add future performance goals.

📅 The one-on-one meeting software facilitates developmental conversations and performance check-ins for remote teams.

📚Finally, our library of hundreds of learning resources from dozens of providers will help you bridge skill gaps.

Book your demo today to explore the features for yourself!

❓ FAQs

What is a 9 box review process?

A 9 box review process is a system for employee performance evaluation. The system has nine boxes, each representing a combination of a performance score and a potential score. 

Each employee is placed in one of the nine boxes depending on the review process results. 

The review process consists of 2 parts: evaluating current performance and future potential. Exactly how the performance and potential are evaluated depends on the review processes within the company and the relevant metrics.

How can the 9 box grid improve employee performance management?

A 9 box grid visualizes each employee's value to the company and the internal hierarchy among the employees. 

The 9 box tool enables employee performance management since each of the nine boxes requires a slightly different type of action plan. 

For example, for employees with high performance and potential, it's essential to ensure they feel challenged within their current role and can see a clear growth path. 

For those with low performance and low potential, the focus should be on why the employee doesn't deliver as expected, whether anything can be done to increase their motivation, or if it's time for a hard decision.

How do I use the 9 box grid to identify high-potential employees? 

Anyone in the upper row is a high-potential employee with various degrees of performance. 

If they are in the leftmost column, their potential is high, but their performance is low. These people are often eager to learn but aren't yet able to bring value to the company.

An example of this is recent university graduates. 

Another example is when your company does not communicate and document role responsibilities, so the employee doesn't understand role and performance expectations.

It's important to be transparent with these employees and tell them you're happy with their potential but expect them to improve their performance.