Performance Evaluation Made Simple
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Nobody much likes corporate performance evaluation systems. Managers find them unworkable and uncomfortable. Workers dread them. Many experts think we should scrap them altogether.
But if you're a working manager you don't get much choice. You've got to do performance evaluations on your people using the system your organization has in place.
But with a little effort, you can still do performance evaluation better. Here's how.
There are two different things that go by the name, "performance evaluation." Your organization's formal performance appraisal process is one of them. Since you have to use it, your objective should be to devote your time and energy to making the system deliver the best results possible.
The product of most formal systems is like a report card. It's a summary judgment of performance that took place over a period of time, usually six months or a year.
Even in elementary school, that wasn't the only evaluation. There were tests throughout the period. You teachers talked with you often about how you were doing.
Every day you should be having conversations with your team members about their behavior and performance. If you do that, then you can use the formal evaluation meeting as an occasion to review and to plan.
There should be no surprises. When you sit down at that formal meeting with a team member, he or she shouldn't be surprised by anything you have to say. You shouldn't be surprised by your team member's reactions either.
That will happen when you talk to your team members a lot about their performance. Here's how to make that work.
Figure out what's most important. What are the critical things that your team member should be able to do? What level of performance should he or she strive for? What behavior is important to keep the team functioning at top level? Once you know the answers to those questions, you know what to monitor and measure and adjust.
Show up a lot so you learn about your people and they get to learn about you. And every time you show up take the opportunity to coach, encourage, counsel and correct.
Most of your suggestions to change behavior or performance will be informal. That means you won't need to document. And most of the time your suggestion and coaching will result in improved behavior.
But sometimes things don't change and you need to start documenting. Give notice to your team member before you start. Most often the notice will be enough and you won't need to escalate to documentation.
If you must document, do it right. Keep good, contemporaneous records of the performance or behavior that you're tracking. Be specific about what happened, when and where. Evaluate without adjectives.
Keep good records of your counseling meetings with your team member. What did you say? What did he or she say? How did you agree that things would change? By when? What will happen if things change? What if they don't?
Making small course corrections along the way has a couple of advantages. First, small corrections are far easier to make than big ones, so your odds of a successful outcome go up.
Second, by making small corrections and documenting your counsel and your team member's behavior, you've got the issue on the table. When it's time for the formal performance evaluation, your team member will know where he or she has come up short. And you'll know what they've got to say about how they're doing. No surprises.
Take enough time in the formal session. In one organization where I did research we compared the time that top supervisors devoted to the annual performance appraisal meeting to the time that other supervisors took. The top supervisors spent almost twice as long in the formal session as their less-effective peers.
But, if there weren't any surprises, what did they spend time on? They talked about growth and the future. That's more enjoyable and more productive than going over what did and didn't happen since the last review.
Make agreements on what will happen next. Be sure you leave the formal performance evaluation session with a clear plan for how your team member will develop during the next period and what you're going to do to help.
Boss's Bottom Line
The performance evaluation that makes a difference takes place every day, every time you encounter someone who works for you. If you take every opportunity to coach, counsel, encourage and correct your people, and if you document where you must, there will be no surprises at formal evaluation time. Then you can use the evaluation time to help people grow and develop.
Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.
Categories: Supervision, Performance Evaluation
Tags: Supervision Performance Evaluation
Wally,
Great primer on how to work an existing performance appraisal process to make it most effective. So, many managers get locked into the year-end scorecard mentality and those conversations never seem to work, for either side. They're cumbersome and awkward at best and downright contentious and confrontational at worst.
I'm amazed when I ask business leaders what the purpose of their performance review/appraisal process is and they tell me "to give people feedback on how they're doing" or "to evaluate an employees performance."
They say nothing about "improving the individuals ability to contribute to our organization" or "to improve over the overall performance of our organization and to improve employee attitudes, motivation and engagement."
I think many organizations do a poor job of clarifying the purpose of the process so there is little focus on it until "review time" and then everyone scrambles to get 'em done with little specifics or backup as to the grades given out.
All it takes is a shift in meaning and defining of the process to institute something like you are suggesting.
Skip
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Thanks for those thoughtful comments, Skip. I think most companies do appraisal the way they do it because that's how they've always done it. When you ask them why they do it that way, they repeat what they've heard.
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Wally,
You made good points! I think sometimes we need to be strict to employees, otherwise, they will not learn the lesson. Some of employees have the attitude that they don't want to improve themselves when leaders only give the notice. I think in the different industry/company we should have to have different management process.
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Hi, Jenny. Thanks for adding to the conversation. I think everyone in the workplace needs to be accountable for both performance and behavior. For most bosses, that means being crystal clear about a few, important, expectations. Then it means being in contact a lot, having conversations and helping team members and the team succeed.
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I have never been a fan of the performance review. Mainly because I have never seen it used the way you are describing here. I have seen it the opposite way. Where a boss who never gets involved, quickly tries to throw a years performance of an employee together in a couple weeks. Things often get forgotten and overlooked this way. Then you have the boss and employee all bashing the performance evaluation at once. Complaining about how they don't like to do them, but they have to. Something that means so much should not get such little respect, and should not get crammed into a couple of weeks. Your suggestion is a great answer to this. This system makes much more sense, and when there is a better system there are better results. The idea that there should be no surprises in the evaluation is right on. I think the only time surprises come up in an evaluation is when the boss hasn't made himself present and hasn't made what he want's out of his employees apparent during the year. When a boss is available to work with the employees on behavior and performance throughout the year, the employee will perform better and the results of the evaluation will be better (if the employees has been making an effort). Or if the results of the evaluation are not good, at least the evaluation was fair.
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What you're describing is poor supervision. Without that, no system will work. Thanks for sharing your experience.
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Excellent tack to take, Wally. You're right that managers do not have a choice about following a prescribed "performance review process," regardless of the value they may (or may not) see in it.
I would add, while it's important to document efforts to help an employee change behavior, it's just as important to document when they do things well. That's one of the major problems with the annual or bi-annual review process, as you point out. It's limited to what can be remembered by one person.
Instead, make it clear to your employees that you will "document in their file" their successful efforts as well. Give them the option of also "documenting in a colleague's file" such recognition as well. This gives the manager a much broader perception of performance come formal review time, as well as removing the stigma of "documentation." Now it's become about performance and behaviour improvement, which can be positive documentation as well as what has been traditionally perceived as negative.
Of course, Globoforce makes this easy to do with our approach to strategic recognition, but with a little effort, any manager can implement the same idea (even if not officially supported by the company as a whole).
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Thanks for the reminder, Derek. It's absolutely important to document the superior performances so that they're all there at formal appraisal time.
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My current work setting has the corporate sponsored evaluations which were just completed and in my opinion are a joke. Almost every employee receives a perfect score or close to, with perhaps one general thing to fix along with each employees own opinion to what they can fix. These evaluation seem to me to be a mere protocol so that the larger up corporate offices can see that they are done. Perhaps the strength of unions in hospitals or the gutlessness of the management is to blame. However I think you are correct when you suggest there be constant meetings and plantings. This is emphasized with MBTI and other personality tests. A manager must know the employees and manage accordingly on an intimate level so as to provide better feed back for improvement. In baseball there is the manager (coach) and general manager. To many times are these lines crossed and because of it the coach lacks in knowledge or his players and a losing record is produced, this can be readily applied to the work force.
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Wow, Alexander, thanks for sharing your experience and observations. Your comments sparked several thoughts.
The situation you describe where everyone gets a top rating and no one is "awful" is exactly the situation that led Jack Welch to institute his infamous, "fire the bottom ten percent" dictum. It's a toxic situation because good performance is not truly rewarded and poor performers are kept around to drag down the team.
I've seen other versions of that. At one company I know, no one ever gets the top rating in more than one area. Another, in practice but not in writing, specifies that there must be one top rated group member and one bottom-ranked one. The bottom line on all those "rules" is that any system that doesn't reward good performance is flawed.
I loved your phrase "plantings." That's a perfect description of what should be happening.
It's vital for a boss to know team members and be known to them. That only happens if you show up a lot and have conversations with team members, yet those two steps are left out of an awful lot of training for new bosses.
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We have our employees rate their own performance based on metrics we have already put in place. That way there is no question on how they are doing- they know before their supervisor that they need to step it up on performance.
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Thanks, Gina. I think that works well for the things that you can use metrics for, presuming the metrics are on things that actually affect performance in a significant way and can be measured in close to real time. They also, of course, need to be metrics that the people whose performance is being measured have control over.
But beyond that, there are behavior issues in every team which are only partially subject to numerical description. That's where the supervisor's job gets both tricky and important.
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Ideally,the performance evaluation should be a team effort between the employee and the employer. Last year I did receive comments in my review that I perceived negatively and I was definitely surprised.
My boss started the evaluation by saying "We've had problems with you." In retrospect, I think (hoped) it was a perception problem since I worked night shift and saw the boss on Monday AM when I was the most tired. So I did write a response, telling my supervisors that I would take steps to improve, though
I also expected certain behaviors from her, including feedback during the year. It has been a difficult year. However, I have also benefited from the actions I took, including returning to school, and was accepting into my profession's honor society! I just submitted my info for this years eval.
I reviewed the forms and typed a computer document that I E-mail to boss
She thanked me for submitting the info.
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Thanks for sharing that, Terry.
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Yeah, negative feedback really shouldn't be a surprise during the review. And criticism should be accompanied by constructive tips to improve. I would also add allow enough time, don't go rushing off to a different meeting after 20 minutes of telling someone how inadequate they are...
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Gosh, Laura, that paints such a dismal picture. But, you're right, it's what happens far too often.
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