Performance Appraisals

People motivation and development are cornerstones in good human resources management. The manager is responsible to monitor his subordinates’ performance, to feed-back positive and negative events or achievements and to allow through this learning a further development of his/her staff.

This applies to all people working for the institution regardless of their status as fix employees, independent contractors or volunteers.

a)    Continuous performance monitoring and feed-back

A manager or supervisor needs to monitor or review the performance and activities of his/her employees regularly. A nice conversation once a year is firstly not enough to guide an employee and secondly too late in the event that bad practices or habits have developed over the year. Thirdly, it is obvious that feed-back is most efficient and motivating when given in relation to the performance it refers to.

Example: In July you held a great training course that rose a lot of media interest and lead to a consecutive contract with the client. You expect your manager to recognise your success immediately and not on 31^st of December.

The same is true for negative feed-back, e.g., you did not have enough time to prepare an important presentation at the chamber of commerce and thus the event went quite bad. You would like your manager to sit together with you, analysing what went wrong and how to get back on track. You would maybe also appreciate if he offered you to go take a time management course to overcome your bottlenecks.

How can performance be monitored if the employees are working very independently, directly with clients or in remote locations?

·      Establish a project plan together with the employee and agree on milestones. Ask for a demonstration or brief report once a milestone is completed. This allows to monitor intermediate work results and deadlines of people who work very independently (e.g., publications, reports, databases). Corrective actions can be taken immediately if the employee leaves the planned path.

·      Employees who only work directly with clients without the manager being present (e.g. trainers, consultants, coaches, mentors, etc.) should meet with their supervisor at least once a month and report on their activities and any upcoming issues. The support institution should send out satisfaction questionnaires or do telephone interviews with the clients. This allows the clients to rate their “real” satisfaction with the employee’s performance. If the employee him/herself hands out the questionnaire, the clients mostly tend to give good ratings in order to avoid conflicts or negative feelings.

·      Employees who work in remote locations far from the institution headquarters should need to contact their manger regularly and send reports on intermediate or accomplished work results. The manager will need to make the effort to ensure that the work results were delivered in the quantity and quality agreed. In this case satisfaction questionnaires and phone interviews with clients are very important, too.

b)    Keeping employee performance records

It may sound a bit bureaucratic to maintain employee files, but it is a powerful management support that does not take a lot of time. Try to keep short notices (even hand written) on your performance observations and feed-back. Always note the respective date and other people involved.

The sum of observations will help you to do your yearly performance appraisal meeting with your employees. Furthermore, the notices are a valuable record and early warning system. For example, an employee comes late to an important client meeting. His record shows that this occurred already twice in the last two months. You will speak once more to the employee and try to find out the reason for his neglect. Based on your records you will announce a clear warning to him. If this happened again, you would need to take action and cancel his contract. The employee cannot deny his default (as recorded) and has to accept the consequences. The records are also helpful in case you need to legally justify any personnel decision, like dismissal, promotion or transfer.

c)    Purpose and objective of the annual employee appraisal

Once a year you should meet individually with all of your employees to discuss the past year, their achievements, their improvement areas and professional perspectives.

Note 18 The appraisal meeting serves the purpose to:

The meeting allows the employee to get a detailed impression on how the manager sees his/her performance and attitude. The employee should be able to identify weaknesses and improvement areas and develop corrective action plans with his/her supervisor. Furthermore, the employee gets the opportunity to speak about his/her professional career objectives and ideas.

For the manager the appraisal meeting is a valuable source of information regarding the employees job satisfaction and his/her future plans. In daily operations one often overhears first signals of employees who look for another job outside the organisation. In an appraisal meeting the manager should listen very carefully. In case any problem or unsatisfactory areas are indicated by the employee, the manager should not neglect them. The employee may value a lot if the manager understands his/her concerns and seriously tries to find a solution.

Keep in mind that your human resources are most precious. If you loose a qualified and motivated employee the institution will have to pay for

-      the loss in know-how that the employee already acquired,

-      for the new job search,

-      for the orientation and learning of the new employee (!),

-      for any client mistrust or bad reputation because of people leaving your institution,

-      for any lost professional contacts and networks held by the leaving employee,

-      for lack of motivation in your team because people leaving your institution (!)

d)    The annual appraisal meeting

For this purpose you will use a standard employee appraisal form. This will be handed out to all employees in advance. They should first think about their working year on their own and then discuss their findings with you.

In general an employee appraisal form covers the following areas and should be worked through with fixed staff, independent contractors and volunteers:

·      Date of appraisal and employee name

·      Brief description of job objectives

·      Job accomplishments in the past year

·      Successes and target achievements

·      Key abilities and strengths demonstrated by employee

·      Issues or deficiencies

·      Key improvement areas

·      Overall rating, satisfaction

·      Agreement on work objectives and improvement actions

·      Discussion of short and mid-term perspective, professional career path

See attached example employee appraisal forms.

Form 1

Source: BOLA Project, Copyright Chris Jarvis

Form 2

Source: AllBusiness.com, Copyright Richard D. Harroch

Form 3

Source: 501 Click Corporation

Tip 6 How to hold an employee appraisal meeting?