Developing an Effective Appraisal Program
In last month’s newsletter, we touched on the numerous reasons why performance appraisal systems fail. This month, we’re going to examine some basic approaches to developing an appraisal system that benefits your organization. Remember, appraisal systems are supposed to improve employee performance by giving them the tools to transform themselves into the employees we want them to be.
The first step to developing any appraisal system is to let employees know how their performance is measured. These criteria should be established in a job description with which the employee should already be very familiar. Hopefully, your organization has developed these descriptions because without them any employee evaluation serves little purpose. Let’s assume for this exercise that you have them in place.
There are four areas to focus on when determining the criteria by which to measure employee performance.
Are they strategically relevant to the organization?
If your employee is a customer service representative, then the number of positive or negative customer comments is relevant. Whereas, the employee’s lack of communication with other departments may not be relevant as her supervisor may be responsible for that type of communication.
Do the criteria cover the entire range of the employee’s responsibilities?
Sales people are frequently measured only by the total number of dollars sold when they may also be required to retain clients, communicate with the marketing department and sales manager and many other tasks. These other factors should be taken into account when evaluating the employee so as to drive the preferred behavior.
Are there factors within your organization but outside the employee’s control that have a negative effect on their performance?
A production line employee might have a slower rate of production due to other employee’s poor performance. This should be taken into account when evaluating the employee.
Are these criteria reliable, time-tested measures that tell managers that the employee maintains a certain consistent level of performance?
Does the evaluation consider the entire evaluation period or is the manager just looking at information from the most recent period of time? These measurements and evaluations should be quantifiable if possible: the number of orders completed within a certain time-frame, the number of sales leads generated per month, the number of customer complaints dealt with and the time to respond to the complaint.
Next month, we’ll examine the different approaches to conducting your employee appraisals.
Sincerely,
Jeff Rackler, CEO
KRESS Employment Screening
jrackler@kressinc.com
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