Probation Period: Assessment Plan

In Sweden, it’s common to have a probation period of half a year, during which an employee can quit without a notice period, and the company can lay off the employee (terminate the probation) if they don’t think it’s a good match.

When the probation period ends, it’s very hard to terminate someone’s contract. One needs to go through a thorough performance improvement plan, and what some companies do is buy people out.

So as engineering managers, we really wanted to do a good assessment of engineers’ performance during the first half year. But it’s quite challenging, because onboarding takes time, and it’s hard to assess people when they are still onboarding to the team.

The support we got from HR was the process of assessing at 1, 3, and 5 months, with a list of statements from the competence matrix (expectations for the specific level). It didn’t work so well for us, and we decided to iterate on the process and proceed with the below, with two key changes:

1. Collecting feedback from peers.
2. Defining meeting/not meeting expectations and working with a defined period for improvement in case of not meeting expectations.

The process:

1. Month 1–2: no assessment. We give the maximum support to an employee to onboard, with good documentation, a buddy, available team members, access to pairing, etc.
2. During month 3: we collect feedback from peers to perform a performance review of the employee at the end of month 3. If they are not meeting expectations, we define the expectations well and the improvement period is during months 4 and 5. It’s worth mentioning our performance review questions since they were quite well phrased, in my opinion: what are the achievements of the engineer so far, and what they can do to raise the bar; and how they displayed company values, and what they can do to raise the bar.
3. During month 5: collecting more feedback and getting ready for a performance review at the end of month 5 (or 5.5).

This way, employees know that they still have achievements to make before the decision, and it’s clear if they meet or don’t meet the expectations, and as mentioned above, it includes collecting peer feedback in an organized way. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to work with this process due to leaving the company recently, but I still wanted to document it.

Thanks for reading and if you end up using it, I’d love to hear!