Friday 13 September 2013

Producing An Employee Performance Review Program

By Gregory Covey


Survey after survey has shown clearly that employees are more concerned about being valued for what they do than how much money they make. In fact, their pay comes in far down the list on almost all employee surveys. The clear message to be learned in these surveys is that employees want to hear feedback on their performance. The very best way to accomplish this is with a well structured employee performance review program.

In order to best provide a well structured employee review program we need to decide what is critical about their job performance and what is not. When we talk about what is critical about their performance we are referring to those tasks that an employee performs that make a big difference to our business. As an example, if our employee is a sales representative their customer service skills are critical as opposed to their ability to answering internal employee emails.

Determining what type of rating system you will use as a part of your employee review program is equally important. It is critical that you don't take the easy way out by using a pass or fail system. If you do you will quickly discover that employees are not going to be satisfied with this type of review system at all. Referring back to how we started this article we learned that employees are more concerned with feeling appreciated. Using a pass or fail system will not meet your goal of showing them appreciation.

The grading system used in most schools is a very effective system and therefore our performance review ratings should be designed to model that. As a reminder, that system was a tiered system that rated someone either outstanding or somewhere less than that. The most successful tiered systems will consist of five rating elements. Those elements could be as simple as an A equaling outstanding to a B, C, D, and F equaling unacceptable. You will quickly see that employees really like this type of employee rating system and their performance during the year will show they are striving to achieve something better than an average rating.

One of your final decisions to make is determining if there will be any increase in pay tied to the rating the employee is awarded by their supervisor on the employee review. Most employees will see this as a great incentive to perform at their best during the entire year. Of course with anything there is risk and the risk here is that any time you determine a pay increase on the rating they receive from their supervisor it better be based on objective and fair. In short the rating a supervisor awards must be attached to performance that can be measured like how an employee handles cash and not merely subjective.

At the end of the day if you are trying to insure your employees are feeling appreciated it is crucial that you have a well planned out employee performance review program. As we have stated above it is possible to demonstrate our appreciation for our employees while providing a value added program to our business. A well planned out system will have a tremendous barring on productivity while lowering the company's employee turnover rate. Supervisors know how much high turnover hurts their business. With this said, it is a positive for everyone!




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