Performance Evaluations: "The GREAT EVIL"?: A Follow Up

My post on Performance Evaluations: "The Great Evil"? generated a fair amount of interest. I had asked in that post for people to participate in a small poll where I asked if performance appraisal needed to be eliminated, changed substantially, left alone or needed more training. Here are the results.

• To Be Eliminated 4 (19%)
• To Be Changed substantially 9 (42%)
• No Change, it Is fine the way it is 0 (0%)
• To include more training 8 (38%)

 As you can see, no one is happy with way it is. But not everyone is ready to get rid of it either. So what is the answer? Better yet, what are better questions? I am including one of the comments, from Andy Spence of Glassbead Consulting, where he asked a lot of questions. Read these. How would you respond to Andy's questions? BTW, Glassbead Consulting named this post one of the TOP 10 HR Transformation Articles of April.

 

Andy asks:

Good post and debate which raises some questions for me. Isn't the goal here to improve individual and team performance in line with organisation goals? Shouldn't line managers be monitoring and managing performance on a frequent basis anyway? Does the performance management process actually help organisations achieve this? Would the time, effort and cost better be spent on other 'performance improvement' activities such as manager training or online feedback tools like Rypple? I think we should assess each type of performance improvement activity on its own merits given the business context, capabilities (which are mentioned as a barrier) and goals etc.



 Answer Andy's questions by leaving comments down below. Thanks I am sure we will ALL be interested in your answers.

 

Performance Evaluations: "The GREAT EVIL"?

Periodically performance evaluations/appraisals/reviews get demonized. We have another round of that demonization going on currently. A new book "Get Rid of the Performance Review! How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing -- and Focus on What Really Matters." by Samual A. Culbert and Lawerence Rout is receiving media attention. Culbert wrote an article, Yes, Everyone Really Does Hate Performance Reviews, that appeared in the Wall Street Journal and has been talked about in MSNBC.com's article Want to improve performance? Cancel reviews. Culbert's premise is "This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. Everybody does it, and almost everyone who's evaluated hates it. It's a pretentious, bogus practice that produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive should call a corporate plus." He goes on further to state that it is all about whether the boss likes you or not and that performance reviews damage people psychologically and ruin productivity for the organization.

He also states that "Proponents of performance reviews say that the problem isn't the review itself, but poorly trained reviewers. Sorry, but that doesn't fly: The performance review done exactly as intentioned is just as horribly flawed as the review done "poorly." You can't bake a great cake with rotten milk, no matter how skilled the chef. They also say you need performance reviews to protect against lawsuits by laid-off workers. Nonsense: Most performance reviews hurt a company's case because they aren't honest assessments of a worker's performance."

His solution? Review performance everyday by having conversations.

That is all well and good. I agree with Culbert on a couple of areas. "Reviews" should be done all the time. The world changes too fast not to be doing "course corrections" to avoid surprises. And I think "conversations" are important. And the tools could be improved substantially in many cases.

But I disagree with Culbert on several areas as well. I disagree that the problem is just the tool. You will indeed have problems if you use some crappy check box format that is bought "off the shelf." But you can, through interaction with your employees, design a meaningful review tool that measures performance, updates the job description and provides improvement plans as needed. The problem is that most companies are too lazy to spend the time to do so.

Secondly, I disagree that training is not an issue. It is a major issue. American companies do a notoriously bad job of training supervisors and managers in ANYTHING. Culbert calls for "conversations" around work performance. Asking questions and listening to answers. Well hate to wake you up Mr. Culbert that requires training too. In case you haven't notice most people are not good listeners and don't know how to ask the proper questions. So "conversation" is not the simple solution.

Thirdly, paperwork is necessary in this world. The governments require that you document your decisions. If you do not YOU LOSE! Poor documents can get you in trouble too, no doubt. But NO DOCUMENTS are even worse.

Culbert's arguments almost sound like "sour grapes" from someone who has never gotten a good review. But I think there is a dash of senationalism tossed in there in order to sell a book. Hmmm.. I wonder, will Culbert be paying attention to the book reviews? Or will he ignore them as poor mechanisms produced by untrained reviewers who are only judging his personality?

Now I could be all wet on this, so I have posted a poll in the left column. Vote on your view of performance reviews/appraisals/evaluations and I will publish the results in a week.

Performance Evaluations, Proper Metrics and Fairness

In my "home town" of Atlanta there is a big controversy regarding potential cheating on standardized tests in the Atlanta School System. The cheating does not involve the students. It involves teachers and administrators. Late last year a principal, and several others were convicted of erasing answers and "correcting" the tests in order to inflate the scores from their school. Now several other schools are showing similar patterns of erasures and answer changing. So an investigation is underway.

The underlying problem is not student cheating, but student performance. Principals and teachers are measured on the success, or lack thereof, of their students on standardized tests. Now there is alot that goes into a student being successful beyond just the teacher. These include parent involvement, home environment, peer pressure, cultural considerations, outside influences and more. I am not here to discuss these issues, rather I want to focus on the subject of performance evaluation.

The key to effective performance evaluation is having the right metrics. That is why an "off the shelf" evaluation form is not worth the paper it is printed on. To my way of thinking here are the key components:

1. You have to understand the job,
2. You have to know what needs to be measured,
3. You have to explain it to the employee,
4. You have to get their agreement that those measures are important,
5. You have to course correct as appropriate through the evaluation period (after all, you can't continue to measure sales of a product that is no longer made 6 months in),
6. You have to define the behaviors that are important to the organization (such as NO cheating or erasures),
7. You have to show the employee that they met the standard or did not,
8. You have to administer the system with even handed fairness, and
9. Finally, you have to take action based upon these results. Reward, or don't. Correct or terminate.

In my 20 years of consulting with small business I have found few managers who are willing to put the time or effort into developing an evaluation system like this. I suspect the same may be true of bigger businesses as well. In the school system issue I am not sure if they have the right metrics or not, or the right measure of student success. I will leave that to "the" experts. But it is clear they have not reinforced the no cheating aspect of performance. The consequences of that remain to be seen.

Performance evaluation seems to be a hot topic today. Wally Bock, of Three Star Leadership, addresses this in terms of Presidents day in President's Day and Performance and Tim Sackett of Fistful of Talent  discusses Forced Rankings Are for Winners. Both are excellent discussions of aspects of performance and are well worth the short time it will take to read them.

How have you address the issue of effective performance evaluation in your organization? Educate us with a comment.