Who Needs Employee Performance Reviews?
Insightful article criticizing Bob Behn's stance that employee performance reviews are not helping managers, especially when trying to weed out poor performers.
Who Needs Performance Reviews? In today’s Washington Post, Steve Barr highlights a new commentary
by Bob Behn, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In
Behn’s article, which appears in his monthly newsletter on management,
he argues, provocatively, for the abolition of annual performance
reviews in government, saying they’re a waste of time and have
pernicious side effects.
Behn presents the case of “Robert,” a “really obnoxious goof-off” who
“doesn’t do any work.” In dealing with such an employee, a government
manager has only two choices, he says: Launch an all-out attack, using
all of the resources of the personnel system to try to remove him, or
shrug off his poor performance and give him satisfactory performance
ratings. Behn forgives managers for taking the latter course with
Robert, even if they do so for many years running. He says it would be
better if there were no annual reviews, so that there wouldn’t be any
performance paper trail confronting a manager who came into an office,
took one look at Robert, and wanted to get rid of him.
I have two problems with this argument: First, Behn’s case hinges on
the notion that there simply aren’t enough hours in the week for
managers to do everything they need to do, so they must concentrate on
a few “really important and winnable problems.” But if taking on an
employee who is not just mediocre, but both obnoxious and a complete
slacker, isn’t an important problem, what is? Sure, such cases are
never easily winnable in the federal context, but even if a manager
can’t take on every employee whose performance isn’t great, he or she
must take on the really bad apples.
Second, any system that dramatically reduces the amount of regular,
standardized feedback employees receive will be more, not less, open to
endless challenges from employees on the grounds of fairness. Behn says
that in the absence of performance reviews, managers could put any kind
of written material (good and bad, but he concedes that most of it
would be good) in employees’ personnel files. Doing that well would be
at least as much work as conducting annual performance reviews,
wouldn’t it? Behn partly counters that argument by saying that a
manager could simply put nothing in a poor performer’s record, and that
an “empty file would itself be damning evidence of incompetence.” But
the mere absence of commendations in an employee’s file would hardly
stand up as grounds for dismissal or discipline, unless an agency is
willing to open up every other employee’s file to show how they
compare--which seems an unlikely, if not illegal, prospect.
I have great sympathy for managers who have to deal with poor
performers, especially in the federal context, where climbing the
paperwork mountain can be a truly excruciating exercise. But Behn’s
system would provide managers with even greater incentives to do
nothing about poor performers. And one of the worst things that can
happen to a leader is losing the trust of his or her top performers by
failing to do anything about one of their colleagues who clearly isn’t
meeting minimal performance standards.
Article reprinted from: http://govexec.com/fedblog/
If you need help managing your employee performance reviews, GroteApproach can help.
Who Needs Performance Reviews? In today’s Washington Post, Steve Barr highlights a new commentary
by Bob Behn, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In
Behn’s article, which appears in his monthly newsletter on management,
he argues, provocatively, for the abolition of annual performance
reviews in government, saying they’re a waste of time and have
pernicious side effects.
Behn presents the case of “Robert,” a “really obnoxious goof-off” who
“doesn’t do any work.” In dealing with such an employee, a government
manager has only two choices, he says: Launch an all-out attack, using
all of the resources of the personnel system to try to remove him, or
shrug off his poor performance and give him satisfactory performance
ratings. Behn forgives managers for taking the latter course with
Robert, even if they do so for many years running. He says it would be
better if there were no annual reviews, so that there wouldn’t be any
performance paper trail confronting a manager who came into an office,
took one look at Robert, and wanted to get rid of him.
I have two problems with this argument: First, Behn’s case hinges on
the notion that there simply aren’t enough hours in the week for
managers to do everything they need to do, so they must concentrate on
a few “really important and winnable problems.” But if taking on an
employee who is not just mediocre, but both obnoxious and a complete
slacker, isn’t an important problem, what is? Sure, such cases are
never easily winnable in the federal context, but even if a manager
can’t take on every employee whose performance isn’t great, he or she
must take on the really bad apples.
Second, any system that dramatically reduces the amount of regular,
standardized feedback employees receive will be more, not less, open to
endless challenges from employees on the grounds of fairness. Behn says
that in the absence of performance reviews, managers could put any kind
of written material (good and bad, but he concedes that most of it
would be good) in employees’ personnel files. Doing that well would be
at least as much work as conducting annual performance reviews,
wouldn’t it? Behn partly counters that argument by saying that a
manager could simply put nothing in a poor performer’s record, and that
an “empty file would itself be damning evidence of incompetence.” But
the mere absence of commendations in an employee’s file would hardly
stand up as grounds for dismissal or discipline, unless an agency is
willing to open up every other employee’s file to show how they
compare--which seems an unlikely, if not illegal, prospect.
I have great sympathy for managers who have to deal with poor
performers, especially in the federal context, where climbing the
paperwork mountain can be a truly excruciating exercise. But Behn’s
system would provide managers with even greater incentives to do
nothing about poor performers. And one of the worst things that can
happen to a leader is losing the trust of his or her top performers by
failing to do anything about one of their colleagues who clearly isn’t
meeting minimal performance standards.
Article reprinted from: http://govexec.com/fedblog/
If you need help managing your employee performance reviews, GroteApproach can help.
posted by Shell Harris at 8:43 AM
