November 2019 Volume 1

OPERATIONS & MANAGEMENT

Do Your Employee Reviews Really Work For You? Optimizing Performance Management in the Workplace. By Johanna Fabrizio Parker

I was standing in line at Target recently (admittedly, not an unusual event for me), and the gentleman behind me in line started talking to me about how he used to own a business. He had 30 employees. He said: “Ask me how many showed up each day?” So, I did. His answer: “Half.” He went on to say that he was talking about productivity, which I understood to mean that his employees were there but he didn’t think they were working. My first thought was to wonder what he was like as a boss. But my second thought was about how employees can make or break your business. The largest category of counseling inquiries I receive deals with some aspect of employee performance, and how to improve it, review it, measure it, discipline for it, etc. And with these questions comes the “documentation.” My general rule is, of course, good documents are better than no documents. But no documents often are better than the documents you actually have. One of my current missions is to ask companies to look at their writtenperformance reviewprocess. Start with the reviewdocument itself. Reading it cold, do the categories and measurements actually make sense to you, and more importantly, do they present areas that can be understood and measured? While performance consistent with your overall corporate values -- e.g., integrity, respect, being a good corporate citizen, etc. -- certainly is worthwhile and should be encouraged, what does it mean? I have found that evaluators struggle with how to measure these concepts. My Target friend’s employees may not be productive, but I’m sure most of them were respectful and acting with integrity. In short, absent a huge and obvious problem, everyone gets top marks. A better plan is to use the job description -- or the key pieces of the job description -- as your performance measurement categories.

On the job description, I can imagine your reaction -- we don’t have them. We have them but they are out of date. We just don’t have the time to write job descriptions -- we’re trying to run our business and make the widgets. I get it. How about using this need as part of your evaluation process. Ask the supervisor/manager and the employee (separately) to detail how the employee spends (or should spend) her time. What do each of them think are the most important tasks? Then have them meet and discuss. This exercise can help you compile job descriptions and/or performance review categories, and done separately from the review process, it also can provide a less stressful opportunity for discussion. And it may even uncover some surprises -- both good and not so good (and I’ll talk about the not so good below). Also, on the review document, do you have a space for employee comments? I know these seem to be popular, but why? This is your official company document, which (hopefully) your supervisor has completed carefully and thoughtfully. It’s not supposed to be a time to argue the review points. If an employee has something to say, I’m sure he or she will say it -- and that can be done in a more productive, and less argumentative (point/counterpoint) way. Plus, do you respond to the employee response? And then does the employee? When does it end? Next, have you looked at the review scale itself (if you have a numerical ranking system). The most common is 1-5. (And, generally, an odd number scale is preferable so that there is a middle/ average, and an above and below average.) But, in a 1-5 system -- how do you (or your employees) see a “3”? Equal to a letter grade “C”? That shouldn’t be what it means. On a 1-5 scale, a “3” should mean that the employee is doing her job and meeting expectations.

FIA MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER 2019 30