Performance Appraisals for Increased Productivity and Employee Retention

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Performance appraisals should evaluate quality, quantity, cost and time on top of general employee performance - all of this can be done objectively.

Many employees have reported their fear of, anger for and or distrust of the performance evaluation process. Many times the process is bias in favor of the manager.  Part of the job description for managers is to develop the employees reporting to them and conduct a performance review once a year.  There are managers who are committed to providing their direct reports with good straightforward information about how they are performing and the areas of improvement they need to focus on.  Some managers however, are not so gifted.

Employees come to work with expectations of being successful one task at a time and expect their reward will be continued employment and growth economically and professionally.  They do not come to work intending to be poor performers and team players.  These people have behavioral styles and a set of values.  The behaviors they possess usually point them to the type of work that will produce the best results for them.  Their values define what is important to them and they use them to determine if the current environment is the right one for them.  In short, they use their emotions and deep seated values to do their job the best they can do it.

The best they can be on the job comes from the information they receive from the job description, and what their manager tells them, and what they observe other employees are doing.  They accept assignments based on the information given to them and how they understood the assignment.  If the information was not clearly delivered or the employee did not listen as intently as h/she needed to then the outcome is not likely to be good.  The question then is who is at fault for the poor performance.

It is common for that the requirements of a position will change from the written description due to business conditions.  Changes often occur gradually over an extended period.   The manager may be informed about the changes and often assumes h/her direct reports do as well.  Often this is not the case, which begins the process of the employee not being as productive as they could be.  Therefore, the performance evaluation will not be as effective as it could be.

What is needed is a job focused performance evaluation.  A job-focused evaluation comes from a process that the company uses to define what key accountabilities need to be met for the employee to be a superior performer.  The process demands the manager evaluate performance against the key accountabilities, which reduces the biases that imped many performance evaluations.

Let’s say a position has a key accountability of problem solving which could be defined as anticipating, analyzing, diagnosing and resolving problems.  The question is does the employee manifest these skills. The answer is does the employee do some or all of the activities listed below.

•   Anticipates, identifies, and resolves problems or obstacles.
•   Utilizes logic and systematic processes to analyze and solve problems.
  
•   Defines the causes, effects, impact, and scope of problems etc.
  
  

If the answers are yes, all is good if not why not. Performance evaluations are invaluable tools to increase confidence, performance, team building, and retention.  Benchmarking jobs can produce the tools for effective performance evaluation.

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