The Performance Appraisal Question And Answer Book: A Survival Guide For Managers

The Performance Appraisal Question And Answer Book: A Survival Guide For Managers
Dick Grote
Amacom Books
1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019
238 pp, $17.95, ISBN 0870334441, 1-800-250-5308

HR pro Grote asks and answers 141 questions about structuring and conducting employee performance appraisals in this practical reference on the topic. His presentation explores the four phases of a performance management system (planning, execution, assessment and review) and details the elements of the comprehensive appraisal form and process.

From my experience

Reducing Employee Turnover

Maybe it isn't what you are doing, but what you aren't doing
by Greg Langston

As soon as one of your best employees walks in, you know what is going to happen. The look on his face says it all. "I am leaving." How did this happen? Did you miss something?

What are the reasons that employees leave? You don't have to look very hard to find answers to that one. This seems to be one of the favorite things for human resource researchers to research. And research they have.

Unfortunately, "leaving" gets too much attention. Retention is the focus that will keep you and your employees happy. Remember, if you aren't actively recruiting your employees, someone else will-and someone is probably recruiting your best and brightest right now.

The case for focusing on retention

Every year, businesses face the costs of replacing their key employees at up to 2.5 times the former employee's salary. Add the costs of recruiting, training, lost productivity, and the business knowledge that your former employees have now taken to your competitors and the figure looms even higher.

And it gets worse. Did you know that up to 38% of your managers, supervisors, and team leaders are about to leave? Monster (the premiere online job search company) has seen a 44% increase in new resume postings. In particular, "confidential" postings from job-seekers hiding the search from their bosses are up 13%. With your good employees leaving and the less productive employees staying, the costs can be staggering.

The hidden costs of turnover

The costs of turnover are usually only seen in basic terms: downtime, recruiting a replacement, and training the new-hire. That's a lot like making a grocery list with "food, drink, and health products." You leave the store wondering why these three items cost so much. When you are shopping for a new employee, here is a real shopping list:

o Last paycheck o Leftover vacation hours o Processing the paperwork for separation o Advertising o Meetings o Interviews o Background checks o Medical check-ups o Reading through resumes o Training materials o Lost productivity until position is filled o Learning curve down-time

And you haven't even picked up the milk and bread yet!

What's the solution?

Data can't do anything by itself, and sometimes data can even be misleading. Remember that voluntary turnover data is often gathered from somebody who has already decided to leave. Couple that fact with the adage "don't burn your bridges", and you can quickly see why one of the top reasons given for voluntary turnover is "better pay elsewhere." In other words, nothing personal, Boss.

It is personal!

It is not that people never leave their jobs for a better paying job, but the reason you have lost, are losing, and will lose key talent is probably not related to money. People leave when they are no longer happy. Don't simply focus on the employees on their way out the door. Let's look at the ones who are staying and how to turn the employees planning to leave into key talent planning to stay.

How to slay the turnover dragon 5 Key Retention Factors

If something were stolen from your office-say, a computer-you would probably stop at nothing to find the culprit. Why then do most companies treat the "theft" of an employee as part of the normal course of business? You invest a great deal in each of your employees, so how can you protect that investment? Research shows that when a company addresses the following 5 areas, employees are far more likely to stay.

One: Trust in management

Before you can ask your employees to trust you, you have to determine exactly what your company is all about. How can an employee trust management if he/she doesn't even know what management stands for? Determine your Mission, Values, and Objectives-your MVO statement. There are numerous resources to help you craft your mission, values, and objectives if you have not done so already. If you have already crafted them, it might not hurt to take a second look. Ask yourself the following questions about each element of your MVO statement: o Is this measurable? o Does each element provide value? o Can I explain what it means? o Are our decisions actively based on our MVO?

Once you have determined your company's mission, values, and objectives, you need to measure your employee's alignment with them. This can impart a whole new level of responsibility and accountability in your company. By measuring the performance of your employees with the company's mission, values, and objectives, you can completely align your company.

By incorporating your MVO into your review process, you get an additional benefit-your employees will truly know the company's MVO.

Two: Proper use of skills/abilities

This is one of the most fundamental issues in employee retention: are their duties and esponsibilities properly matched to their strengths and weaknesses? There are many powerful diagnostic systems on the market today-Myers-Briggs and DISC, for example-that can aid you in determining the unique abilities and personality traits of your employees. Many companies have had great success using the Kolbe Index™ (found at http://www.kolbe.com), which provides a scientifically validated assessment of your instincts that you can put to work immediately in all areas of life. The value of the Kolbe assessment is that you get precise data that outlines how your employees can communicate most effectively, the types of actions that match their strengths, how they can maximize their unique abilities, and how to minimize stress. Why should you help your employees discover their MVO and their unique strengths? Productivity is maximized through alignment of your employees to their MVO and their unique strengths. This will ensure that your employees are engaged, plus they will feel appreciated and valued.

Three: Relationship with immediate supervisor

Would you rather work for the worst manager in the best company or the best manager in the worst company? Given this choice, just about everybody would choose the better manager over the better company. Turns out, unhappy employees are usually unhappy because of a poor employee/supervisor relationship.

The keys to solving employee/supervisor issues:

o Discovery: Integrate the discovery of your employees' strengths, values, and goals into your orientation and review programs.

o Measure your employees' alignment with their strengths, values, and goals: Make measuring your employees' alignment with their strengths, values, and goals part of their review process. This will help you find a way for everyone to benefit. If one of your employees had a goal to increase her sales by 25%, you could make sure that receives additional support from the company.

o Measure the alignment of employee/supervisor and supervisor/employee: Employees usually don't leave jobs-they leave supervisors. By measuring the alignment between your employees and their supervisors, you can find the earliest signals of turnover. If you were to only measure the perception of management, you probably wouldn't hear that the employees don't think things are going well with certain managers. On a positive note, measuring alignment gives you another avenue of praise and recognition of a job well done. Above all, by addressing alignment, you are improving communication throughout the company.

In the traditional orientation and review model, you might not discover the problems with your employees and supervisors until it is too late-when key employees start leaving. By incorporating alignment into your model, you can easily see who to promote, who to train, who to praise, what to fix, and who to fire.

Four: Opportunity to learn new skills

If your company has taken the time to discover the unique strengths of the employees, then this retention factor is even easier for you. When you know the strengths of your employees, you are in a much better position to match your need for new skills in the company with employees who are most suited to those skills. This is a win-win for everyone-your company gains new skill sets, and employees are matched to their strengths.

The most important aspect of this is not simply the opportunity to learn new skills; it is to learn new skills that are matched to their strengths. When you need to train ten people in your company in the latest research methods, it would certainly help to know who your ten best researchers are.

Five: Satisfaction with potential career development

We return again to discovering the MVO of your employees. If you know the mission, values, and objectives of your employees, you are in a much better position to determine the best way to match your company's MVO to your employees' MVO. It all comes down to knowledge. If you take the time to discover who your employees are and what they want, there will be no mystery surrounding career development. Most people have never taken the time to determine their personal MVO. By helping them do this, you achieve success on several levels:

One: They will feel like the company really cares about them.

Two: They will know where they want their careers to go.

Three: You will know how to truly maximize each employee's potential.

Bringing it all together

These solutions shouldn't be done piecemeal. Having a mission and values statement is meaningless if no action is taken. Measuring the alignment of your employees to the company's MVO is moot if your employees don't truly know the company's MVO. Without discovering the unique strengths, goals, and values of your employees, you will miss out on your untapped resources. Are there other turnover issues? Of course there are, but when you address the unique strengths and MVO of your employees and focus on alignment throughout the company, many other turnover issues are solved without even trying:

o The need for new challenges: You will help them determine their MVO.

o Personal happiness: You will show them that the company truly cares about them.

o Satisfaction with job role: They will be matched to their strengths.

o Teamwork: Alignment will become a key focus throughout the company.

o Communication: By implementing MVO alignment across the board, you will experience a level of communication most companies only dream about.

By discovering the Distinct Natural Abilities™ of your employees and aligning their MVO with the company's MVO, you will build a stable, low-turnover culture that maximizes everyone's potential.

When Greg Langston began his career in the international business arena almost 30 years ago, he had two objectives:

1) Become a successful global leader and 2) Maximize the potential of all those he came into contact with.

While running operations in excess of $1.2 Billion and 8,000 employees, he learned that without a process and technology, these two goals often worked against each other. He created www.100daystosuccess.com to provide Life, Personal and Business coaches with a proven roadmap which will help their clients Discover, Determine and Direct their futures while driving an excellent return on investment (ROI).

Learn more about employee managment.

Effective Employee Feedback

Make your employee performance feedback have the impact it deserves by the manner and approach you use to deliver feedback. Your feedback can make a difference to people if you can avoid a defensive response.

Here's are some suggestions on how to do it:

1. Effective feedback is specific, not general. (Say, "The report you turned in yesterday was well-written, understandable, and made your points about the budget very effectively." Don't say, "good report.")

2. Effective feedback always focuses on a specific behavior, not on a person or their intentions. (When you held competing conversations during the meeting, when Mary had the floor, you distracted the people in attendance.)

3. The best feedback is sincerely and honestly provided to help. Trust me, people will know if they are receiving it for any other reason.

4. Successful feedback describes actions or behavior that the individual can do something about.

5. Whenever possible, feedback that is requested is more powerful. Ask permission to provide feedback. Say, "I'd like to give you some feedback about the presentation, is that okay with you?"

6. Effective feedback involves the sharing of information and observations. It does not include advice unless you have permission or advice was requested.

7. Effective feedback is well timed. Whether the feedback is positive or constructive provide the information as closely tied to the event as possible.

8. Effective feedback involves what or how something was done, not why. Asking why is asking people about their motivation and that provokes defensiveness.

9. Check to make sure the other person understood what you communicated by using a feedback loop, such as asking a question or observing changed behavior.

10. Effective feedback is as consistent as possible. If the actions are great today, they're great tomorrow. If the policy violation merits discipline, it should always merit discipline.


Tips:

1. Feedback is communication to a person or a team of people regarding the effect their behavior is having on another person, the organization, the customer, or the team.
2. Positive feedback involves telling someone about good performance. Make this feedback timely, specific, and frequent.
3. Constructive feedback alerts an individual to an area in which his performance could improve. Constructive feedback is not criticism; it is descriptive and should always be directed to the action, not the person.
4. The main purpose of constructive feedback is to help people understand where they stand in relation to expected and/or productive job behavior.
5. Recognition for effective performance is a powerful motivator. Most people want to obtain more recognition, so recognition fosters more of the appreciated actions.

Contributed by About.com

An effective article on maintaining a good rapport between you and your employees. Contstructive feedback will always play a part in that equation.

Motivation is Key to Increasing Employee Performance

What’s an organization to do when all of its honest and genuine efforts to motivate Sally and Sam to come to work on time, work safely, deliver efficient services, and act as if they were happy to be a part of the team, fail? There is no shortage of pop-psych books and motivational speakers who’ll tell you a thousand-and-one ways to light a fire in Sam’s belly. But what do you do when the fire goes out and none of those thousand-and-one ways seem to work any more? What do we really know about motivation?

Does anything work?
Given the constant barrage of pep talks and posters, slogans and free advice on the topic of motivation, there should certainly be at least a couple of core principles that predictably work every time. Aren’t there? Or are we stuck with the notion that everybody’s an individual, and what’s a turn-on for Sally is likely to be a turn-off for Sam?

Rather than speculate, let’s gather some data. Think back through all the jobs you’ve ever had, and bring to mind the job you had that produced the greatest amount of motivation in you. It doesn’t matter what the job was — it might be the job you have right now; it might be a part-time job you had in high school. Doesn’t matter.
It also doesn’t matter what the word, “motivation,” means to you. However you choose to define the term is fine. Simply bring to mind the job that you had when you had the greatest degree of job satisfaction, excitement, enthusiasm, turned-on-ness.
Now that you’ve got the job clearly in mind, quickly jot down the factors that caused you to feel so motivated, so satisfied, and so turned on. If you’re like most people, the factors you listed are highly predictable — and so are the ones that didn’t make your list.

On your list appear such items as recognition, opportunities for achievement, freedom and autonomy, challenge, the chance to learn and grow, and the work itself. What was missing? You probably didn’t write down such important items as job security, benefits, working conditions, and the organization’s policies and procedures.
It turns out that the missing link in understanding motivation is understanding that there are two very different factors at work. On one hand there are the things that motivate us, that turn us on, that cause us to feel satisfied with the job. On the other are those things that dissatisfy us, that turn us off, that demotivate us. There are two separate variables at work, and you have to attack both of them. Psychologist Fred Herzberg stated it best, “Job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are not flip sides of the same coin. They are entirely different coins, and the wise manager uses both those coins to buy better performance.”

What is motivation?
A good working definition of motivation is this: motivation represents a measurable increase in both job satisfaction and productivity. The motivated worker does his job better and likes it more than those folks who are not so motivated. What generates real motivation is the first set of factors mentioned: opportunities for achievement and accomplishment, recognition, learning and growth, having some say in how the job is done, and worthwhile work. Those are the items that generate strong feelings of loyalty, satisfaction, enthusiasm, and all those other important attributes we want to see in those whose paychecks we sign.

But you can’t get away with working exclusively on the satisfiers scale. You have to make sure that you clean up the job to reduce or eliminate those things that cause people to be unhappy and quit.

Wait a minute, some of you are saying — where does money fit into this scheme? Pay is the ringer in the equation; the one factor that shows up as both a source of satisfaction and a source of dissatisfaction. People are dissatisfied with their pay when they feel it isn’t commensurate with their efforts, or is distributed inequitably, or doesn’t reflect the responsibilities of the job, or is out of touch with market realities. If you don’t pay competitive wages, people will be unhappy and they will quit. But no matter how much you raise salaries, you won’t generate motivation and job satisfaction, because job satisfaction is a function of the content of the job.

Look at it this way: Hire me to wash dirty dishes and pay me chickenfeed and I’ll be unhappy and demotivated. But raise my wages to a princely sum and guess what — I’ll still hate washing dirty dishes. But I won’t complain any more about my crummy compensation; I probably won’t quit; and I may even improve my attendance record (if you pay me my munificent wages on an hourly basis). What you have bought with the generous pay increase you provided me was not real job satisfaction. All you have bought is the absence of dissatisfaction. They are not the same thing. If you really want me to be a happy camper, you’d better change the nature of my work.

And changing the nature of the work is the true key to motivation. The message is clear: do everything you can to get rid of the things that generate employee unhappiness, recognizing that no matter how big an investment you make you’ll get precious little in return. All your money will buy is the absence of dissatisfaction. Listen up — you have no choice! You must pay people competitive wages, you must provide a healthy, safe and attractive work environment, you must give at least as good insurance policies and vacations and retirements plans as people could get working for the bagel joint down the street. If you don’t, people will quit and you won’t be able to hire replacemhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifents. But all you’ll get for the fortune you spend in this effort is a bunch of people who have to search hard for something to complain about.

If you want genuine motivation, though, you’ve got to look at the job itself. Does the work provide me with the chance to really accomplish something? Does my job allow me to do something that makes an actual difference? Do I have a lot of say in how I do my job or am I totally constricted by standard operating procedures? Can I learn and grow and develop on this job, or will I be tightening the same nut on the same bolt for the next thirty years? Do I get any recognition when I do something particularly well?

Providing recognition of good is the best place to start. Recognizing good performance any time it’s encountered — with just a “Thanks” or a literal pat on the back — can be enough to get the motivational engine working. Sally and Sam will need more than just an attaboy, but acknowledging excellent work every time it appears is a wonderful place to start the engine of motivation running.

Keeping track of your employees performance is crucial. GroteApproach can help with their online employee appraisal software.

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.

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