Employee Evaluations
cwells
43 Posts
Is there anyone out there who does not do evaluations? If so, why not? We're undecided if we should continue this practice. :-?
Comments
I would caution against bringing the process to a halt. While it does generate an incredible amount of paperwork and is time-consuming, evaluating employees on a regular basis provides a benchmark for progress and job skills. If there is a decline, you've begun the needed papertrail. This also assists new management in getting to know the employees strengths and weaknesses.
An evaluation should be fair and as impartial as possible. It is harder to evaluate in postions that are not always cookie cutter tangible--but a manager should know his/her people well enough to be honest and accurate.
Talk to your managers and ask them how you can make the review process easier for them. The easier they are the more likely they'll do them. They also may buy into the easy part. Next work with them to develop CLEAR expectations. They should be in line with the vision, mission and values of your company. You also need to figure out your format-rating, ranking, narrative, etc. Pro's and con's to all. If your managers could care a less about helping you, try to elicit support from senior mgmt. Take your case to them as to why reviews are beneficial (see above for examples). If they don't care either, polish up your resume. I could give you a lot more info, but I hate typing. If you would like to talk more let me know.
PORK
Instead we are moving to the following:
1. In keeping with Lean & the one-piece flow philosophy, performance will be evaluated on a daily and weekly basis. How do we do this? We already have a system in place called Performance Notes Online that was created by our IT folks for supervisors to document good and poor performance. We've expanded our services in HR to allow us to type this information in for our typing-challenged supervisors. AND, we already have rules/accountability regarding the information & we discovered that a yearly review is just a regurgitation of the same PNO's.
2. Managers, because of their, dare I say it, duty, to the bottom-line, already meet with the CEO every 6 weeks and so added to that meeting, the CEO will track to see where the manager is going, the results & vision for the next 6 months to a year.
So you see, employees know where they stand on a daily & weekly basis, rather than waiting all year to here, "Joe, you do great work" and HR still gets it's documentation. To all of you who might say, "Yeah, but what about the employee - what wil their reaction be," I'm not worried about the employee reaction, because honestly, as long as someone says good job or you need to do this better on a daily/weekly basis, the annual review is really just a time set aside to discuss what's really on their minds - how much more money do they get.
I think you have answered your question in your above statement. Appraisal programs should not be done away with because some people don't like them and some won't do them correctly and others do just enough to get by. I think what you might need is training and reinforcing the value of appraisals throughout the organization and finding ways to make them work. I know it's sorta trendy to do away with things like appraisals; but, there ultimate value outweighs trendiness. I've known companies that did away with name tags and others that started calling everybody Mr. or Miz. and others that made everybody put on a blue jump suit when they entered the building no matter what your 'rank' was so that everybody at the facility looked like George Jetson. Breaking paradigms for the sake of seeing them crumble is not a good use of time or money.
For those supervisors are intent on making the system NOT WORK, find a way to tie their performance to their pocketbook and you will see their interest increase.
edit:
Sorry, I had not had my coffee yet. My daughter woke me up at midnight and 5:00am, so I was a little grumpy.
Don hit the nail on the head. Are you the highest level HR person at your facility? If you are I think your problem is credibility. I'm not saying it's your fault, though. Your Man. mgr is probably a hard headed pain in the aXX. Their are some things you can do to work on your credibility with the Man. mgr.
1. Understand the he/she only cares about what they are producing and doing things that help them produce it better and cheaper.
2. You have to show him how what you do helps him produce things cheaper and better. Can you find an example where a performance review actually helped the production process? If not, start looking and asking the people doing the reviews. Use that thought process whenever you try to "sell" something to this person. It's too bad you cannot mandate, but you've got to work with what you have.
3. You get your credibility ONE step at a time. Don't force it and don't expect it to happen over might. If you present it the way he/she wants to hear it you should succeed.
If appraisals are to work they must be viewed by ALL managers as their management tool, not an HR thing. There must be full backing from the chief executive who does his/hers accurately and on time as well. Using the goals and objectives approach is better, but the same managers who are don't call it like it is in the trait appraisal approach will figure out ways to justify why it wasn't the employees fault that the employee couldn't meet the deadline or will hold the employee accountable for missing a deadline even when there were other events, not of the employees making, which created that outcome.