Is your employee appraisal system driving performance or just a paperwork exercise?
Do you dread doing your performance appraisals? Do your employees dread receiving them? Do the reviews measure the aspects of your employee’s positions that are important to you now or are they the same forms you have been using for years? Maybe you aren’t providing meaningful feedback.
If you haven’t taken a close look at your forms in the past couple of years, now is the time. Today we will just look at manager’s reviews and make sure that you are measuring against clearly stated expectations.
The first section should be objective expectations for the position; Profit, Sales Revenue, Guest Scores, Turnover, Internal Audit Scores and any other clearly defined objectives. The expectations should be spelled out prior to employment or at the beginning of the year. It is simply a “Yes” or “No” to whether or not they met them. Or it can be as clearly defined as making 95-100% of budget is “successful,” and 94% equates to “Needs Improvement”.
However, I see reviews all the time that take objective issues and make them subjective. They become subject to the whim of a manager who likes the person and can’t bear being the deliverer of bad news. It allows managers to allow “mitigating” circumstances to change the evaluation to a satisfactory performance. Get these out of your reviews.
Once you have looked at the objective portions of the performance review, take time to rate their behavior. What are the behaviors you evaluate? Has your management team sat down and talked about what is expected and how it is defined? What are the behaviors that are expected? I suggest evaluating these areas in terms of “Strength”, “Competency”, or “Challenge”. It defines the behavior clearly.
Some of these behaviors might include:
- Leadership
- Communication
- Team Building
- Planning
- Problem Solving
- Technical Skills
- Decision Making
When you take this positive new approach to your reviews, your employees will look forward to knowing where there career is going and that they are being evaluated against clearly defined objectives rather than against another employee.
Can I assist you in this transformation in your company? If so, contact me at:
