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performance reviews
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performance reviews
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How do you deal with the employee who brings her own evaluation (as she is supposed to)to the performance review, but clearly thinks she walks on water? The supervisor's evaluation is not even close,
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performance reviews
posted at 7/25/2001 2:20 AM EDT
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Posts: 3
First: 7/25/2001 Last: 9/21/2004 |
How do you deal with the employee who brings her own evaluation (as she is supposed to)to the performance review, but clearly thinks she walks on water? The supervisor's evaluation is not even close, but she doesn't want to devastate the employee by taking issue with every single item. How do you keep this from happening in the first place? Suggestions? |
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performance reviews
posted at 7/26/2001 11:50 AM EDT
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Posts: 11
First: 7/26/2001 Last: 6/13/2002 |
The majority of employees will almost always provide a great self evaluation. It's not that they aren't great performers, but they see a direct link to a pay increase. Most believe that they can influence the supervisor into a higher score than deserved and thus get a bigger raise. Unless, she does walk on water, than a good evaluation with factual support will usually help them understand the rating. Remember, as most things, good clear communication is key. |
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performance reviews
posted at 7/27/2001 9:25 AM EDT
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Posts: 3
First: 7/27/2001 Last: 7/27/2001 |
My food for thought questions is: Is the current performance review process realistic.... or humane?
The format for most companies' performance reviews and basis for evaluation has become almost as high tech and wrought with complicated "motivational based" instructions as a computer program. The most stressful time period in a manager's life has become performance review time. Managers are given extensive training to understand and implement these complicated evaluation processes created by so-called professional consultants, which our companies have bought into. These evaluations are based on psychological motivational theories that do not allow us to evaluate based on an employee's true performance and expertise, taking into consideration the humanity of these employees. The employee that has built industry and intracompany relationships and respect, and who succeeds a realistic 90% of the time, is subject to these complicated scenarios that many of us don't understand and creates built in failures as the result of the misunderstanding and unrealistic expectations. We are required to include something they have failed at in order to spur them forward. The reality is that the employee and the managers are put in a lose-lose situation, where they feel they can't win, no matter how hard they work or practically let blood for the company. This complicated performance review is supposedly meant to push our employees to greater and greater heights. What it succeeds in doing most of the time is to frustrate the employee that is happy doing his job well, collecting his paycheck and taking care of his/her family, as well as the manager who is trying to accomplish corporate goals. Another question: How many of your employees walk out of their performance reviews feeling happy and successful. The experience of my peer managers has been more frequently that we feel we've let both the employee and our employer down. The employer has bought into these complicated review processes as the one right tool to increase business and improve product quality. The employee is let down because most employees put their all into their jobs and take pride in them. Neither usually get what they expected through this review process. My personal feeling is that we need to get back to treating our employees like the human beings they (and we) are. There is a lot to be said for employee education programs, motivation, following the law in protecting the employer against lawsuits from employees, etc. But, my personal feeling is that we've gone too far. The stresses of this process actually seem to undermine the very thing we are trying to accomplish. |
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performance reviews
posted at 7/27/2001 9:53 AM EDT
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Posts: 3
First: 7/27/2001 Last: 7/27/2001 |
We expect employees to evaluate themselves. This is ridiculous in its very concept. The employer should be the one evaluating the employee based on the job requirements, experience requirements and goals and accomplishments..
Most employees have no H.R. background. They don't speak the language. They don't have the ground rules for the complicated evaluation process, itself. At a complete disadvantage and facing the requirement that he/she fill out his own evaluation and bring it to the performance review, an employee is faced with an often embarrassing and failure ensuring task. What might be better is to ask an employee to prepare an informal list of what they perceive their accomplishments or successes to be; what they have learned on the job or through outside education; what they are most proud of; what they think could be improved in their area, etc., and submit it prior to the manager performing his/her review of the employee's performance. In this way, the manager would have the employee's input to consider when he is considering the employee's performance, helping him to understand how the employee approaches the job, itself and how he sees his own performance and aspirations. This might eliminate the problem of what the manager sees as an over-inflated self-evaluation. Most non-exempt jobs are process and detail oriented and are filled by employees with that particular expertise and experience, usually by non-college educated employees. To expect these employees to approach this process on the same level as a manager is to create another lose-lose situation, not only for the employee, but for the manager. Moreover, we might also consider eliminating the 360 degree evaluation, which invites evaluation of an employee by everyone he/she comes in contact with. Many of these employees also do not have H.R. experience and are being forced into an uncomfortable position of playing on a field where they have no experience and trying to objectively evaluate a peer. By demanding the employee write a self-evaluation, we have created a situation that the employee will fail at, have to defend, and be penalized for failing at something they are not trained do do. It's ridiculous. The Rebel |
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performance reviews
posted at 7/30/2001 5:37 AM EDT
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Posts: 132
First: 7/3/2001 Last: 5/12/2004 |
I agree. Only supervisors should be involved in writing evals.
We have our employees "prepare" for an performance eval by compiling a short list of goals (2 or 3) they wish to accomplish and in what time frame they intend to do so. This process helps them focus their efforts to improve and offers us another tool with which we may evaluate the employee's progress of stated goals. |
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performance reviews
posted at 7/31/2001 9:26 AM EDT
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Posts: 9
First: 7/31/2001 Last: 8/22/2001 |
Adding to the good suggestion that employees bring 2-3 goals they want to achieve into the evaluation discussion are a few basics about evals -- based on many years of internal and consulting experience.
1. It is a 2-way street. Manager and employee must be able to have a meaningful discussion about the work, skills/competencies to perform it, expectations, results and how to get from where the employee is to where he/she needs to be. I have seen the type of eval that seems to take a statistics expert to use and I have to say that this creates problems, perhaps more than the intended "fairness" issue they try to address. If a company is using a format that the employee could not learn and complete on themselves or others, then it's just too complicated; unnecessarily so. You shouldn't have to be a college grad to do this. We're all making life just too hard. 2) Standards and expectations must be set at the very beginning -- either upon hire or transfer/promotion. In the instance you've provided, clearly there is a breakdown of communication between these two folks day-to-day. There apparently is no "real" feedback being given to the employee, positive and negative on a day-to-day/weekly/monthly basis to help her along and provide the company with the best performance/results. 3) Yearly reviews are too seldom. If the company sticks with this policy, tho, managers can use that yearly formal review to set (along with the employee) goals for development and performance. Incorporate what is possible of the employee's goals into what the company goals are. When these are aligned, many good things happen. 4) Managers need to provide performance feedback to employees a lot. Catching people doing something right helps tremendously in motivating them. Then, when a comment about what needs improving must be made, the positives are not completely overshadowed (it takes, I think, 14 positives to overcome 1 negative, motivationally speaking). 5) Not the least, but my last comment is that performance reviews really need to be directed at specific jobs -- unless you've got a factory with people actually doing exactly the same job, you have people doing different jobs. For instance, an AA is not an AA. Admin Assistants do remarkably different work depending on the department and the manager or even individual manager/exec they work for. Good luck! Sharon |
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