“Hi my name is Lance and I hate performance review time.”
“Hi Lance”
Even your satisfied and engaged HR guy dislikes certain aspects of human resources. I know, hard to believe. One of those things are annual performance appraisals. It is this time of year (along with our health benefit renewal) that I start to question things. Why did I decided HR would be a good fit for me? Why don’t they teach classes in business school about this (yeah, I was totally blindsided)? What physical force in the universe can keep me from choking some of our managers?
Like many things in life though, some of the most difficult tasks in life are also the most important and talent management is not an exception. While I hate to admit it, all of these reasons make sense.
So why do you need great performance management system that includes periodic reviews?
- Regularly Scheduled Performance Communication - You should be giving consistent feedback to your employee and of course everyone does that, right? Even if you are doing everything right, you need to have a kind of summary event (annual/biannual/quarterly) so people know where they are overall (not just day to day). And if you aren’t doing everything right, it forces you to do at least one thing right on a regular basis.
- Setting Your Bar High - Many employees are goal oriented so it should be no surprise that an effective performance and compensation management system puts an emphasis on setting goals. This age old tradition of stating what you want to accomplish and then going out and accomplishing it has been fairly successful. And a good performance management system will not only help you set goals but it will also help you align the personal goals of your employees to the overall goals of the entire organization.
- Using The Same Measuring Stick - Employees want to feel like they are being evaluated fairly. And for your own sake, you probably want to make sure employees are evaluated fairly. That’s why a good system will not only take out most of the subjectivity, it will give you baselines, benchmarks or goals that people at certain levels within the organization. If you have an employee that is significantly better at her job than her peers, your performance management system should be able to recognize that.
- Getting The Full Picture - A proper performance management system can help supervisors and HR get the full picture of an employee. While your day to day interaction with an employee may ebb and flow or if you have minimal contact with an employee, a great system can enable you to get a more complete picture and enable you to make better decisions.
- It Works - I could have just said this, right? It is the most important so I saved it for last. Good performance management systems work and it is a win/win for employers and employees. Employees get feedback from their employer that is consistent with their co-workers. Employers get to recognize achievements and properly deal with underperforming employees. Even your underperforming employees will appreciate a system that treats them fairly and gives them the opportunity to improve.
In the end, no matter what else is going on at the time, performance management has to come first. And the great thing about it is that a performance management system doesn’t cost much and the rewards of properly managing it pays dividends in the form of higher performance, great productivity, higher employee morale and a real significant impact to the bottom line.
This post is being sponsored by Halogen Software who specializes in Talent Management. Halogen offers a complete suite of web-based HR software that lets you automate, simplify and integrate employee performance appraisals, 360 degree reviews, compensation management, succession planning and learning management.
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Lance, solid argument for the virtues of a performance management program.
One of the things I’ve seen at a few organizations (and this touches on your point about “Using the Same Measuring Stick”) is that some managers are a lot tougher in rating their employees than others. Studies have indicated that trainings on common rater error don’t actually work, and can in some cases actually exacerbate the problem.
Do you have any suggestions on how to ensure managers truly are using the same measuring stick?
- Chris
“a good system will not only take out most of the subjectivity, it will give you baselines, benchmarks or goals that people at certain levels within the organization”
I agree! Unfortunately, it seems that unless you’re in a field with measurable results (e.g. sales, recruiting, production) it’s often difficult to remove subjectivity.
In my field, the whole thing seems completely arbitrary (which I hate of course!)! While we do have national “guidelines”, each office is evaluated differently and then some managers are tougher than others.
I’ve been pushing to have some sort of benchmarking or standards established, but they can’t seem to come up with any. Any recommendations for employees who are the object of completely subjective/arbitrary evaluations?
Lance, I might also add and it goes along with your point one that MOST employees, actually LIKE and NEED knowing where they are in regards to their performance.
Lance,
Like the post - it is the integration that helps things work, from integrated social media to integrated performance management. Setting clear goals, communicating throughout the year, these things have been the perf. mgmt. standard for years, yet managers still struggle to do this — and somehow there is still the inspection/evaluation mentality out there. Halogen has some good design to help counteract some of these piecemeal/inspection tendencies in organizations.
Lance,
Great post. Can’t agree more. The typical performance review system is broken. I can’t understand why it ever came to be that we would evaluate our employees on a yearly basis. I need reviews on a monthly basis. I think organizations that continue to review annually will suffer especially with Gen Y’s. As a Gen Y, I can tell you we love to be coached. So why wait a year to tell us what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong. We need to see our progress.
Chris,
There is no easy solution for this in my opinion. I can only tell you what I’ve done: I’ve sat in on hundreds of reviews myself across the entire organization and coached specifically to each manager’s toughness (or softness).
Ian,
Benchmarking is a good start. As to where to start, I often think it is best to look first at deliverables. While you may be in marketing and I may be in HR, we both get to produce and there are similar standards. Does it meet the demands of the customer? Was it timely? While our customers and projects may be different, there are a few objective standards by which we can evaluate.
Yeah, who would have guessed right? I want to hear how I am doing.
I absolutely agree with you there. If you make something integrated with your daily routine (like proactive performance management), you get it done. When you don’t, it makes it much more difficult and that can lead to “surprises.”
Jeff,
True. Feedback becomes less effective as time separates the feedback from the action. If you do something good in September but you don’t get recognized for it until annual reviews in July, what is that going to mean to you? I can tell you how I’d feel about that (”Uh, why didn’t you give me that ‘atta boy’ in September?”).
Nice article, of course I’m biased being in the performance review software sector. Receiving regular consistent feedback is quite valuable. It gets people more accustomed to focusing on their performance from day to day. Frequent input allows people to be more receptive, rather than having to bear the stress of a looming once-a-year judgement day that fails to capture nuances throughout the year. You don’t check your speedometer once a year. A continual feedback loop helps to keep you on course.