Performance Evaluation Shouldn't Be Difficult

The time of year is upon us where some have already completed their performance evaluations and some are ongoing currently. It doesn't matter if you are an employee who must face the realities of summarizing the last six months worth of contributions or a manager who must do the same AND review potentially a dozen or more of these summaries, performance evaluations for most people are a daunting task. I’d like to share some insights from the perspective of a leader who has to review and decide as well as an individual who must create the dreaded summary and how we can all reduce the associated pains.

To begin, let’s take a moment to pick apart the reasons that we go through the performance evaluation cycle and question some assumptions. The goal of the evaluation process is to ensure that employees are contributing in a way that aligns with their job requirements and organizational goals, to provide feedback, and guidance. Additionally we identify and correct any deviations from their work and determine if any changes to an employee’s compensation package are warranted. There are additional data points that can be drawn from this process such as headcount reconciliation, or a need for overall organizational structure effectiveness, but we’ll focus on what matters most to employees and managers. In most performance evaluation processes there will be set of high-level goals (ie, reduce defects) which are typically mandated by the organization. Employees may frequently see these presented as a set of core values which should be discussed regularly in a healthy organization. In a less healthy organization, they will either be ignorant of them or will ONLY see them on their midyear and end of year evaluations. Within these high-level goals, individual managers are often tasked with creating more personalized goals; these can be unique to each employee, but for the sake of efficiency, they are often set for a given work discipline so that employees on a team are all tasked with the same goals. It is this set of goals that will be responsible for how effective or painful the performance evaluation process can be. 

If it is the case that a set of high-level goals are quietly pasted into an entire organization’s worth of employees and do not see the light of day until the midyear review begins, the process will be stressful for both employee and manager alike. Why? If the individual who must submit evidence of their work toward a goal is given a vague goal such as “drive intra-team collaboration” they will be lost in terms of producing concrete evidence that they have successfully accomplished this. As a result, either they will write a very brief statement that means nearly nothing as a product of confusion and frustration or they’ll write an incomprehensible tome that will not only take considerable time and effort to create, but will not actually accomplish anything useful. Furthermore, if a manger with a dozen or more employees has to review similar evaluations, now the manager must make potentially career-changing decisions based on information that is extremely inconsistent and borderline useless. If there is an employee who is clearly not performing, the performance evaluation can be either the tool of correction and guidance or evidence that can be used for termination—if there is no evidence of missed targets, the underperforming employee can carry on and the manager is now faced with an uphill battle for either correction or termination! So now the process will not be useful in making sure that employees are working on their core tasks, it will not be useful to provide feedback or guidance and it will make decision making for compensation and promotion an anecdotal guess at best. 

So how does a manager prevent this from happening and how can an employee identify and avoid such a pitfall? There are two key ingredients that are required in order to make a useful performance evaluation a possibility. The first is to have more than just high-level goals. It is the responsibility of senior leadership to empower managers with clear guidance as it pertains to performance evaluation. It is NOT sufficient to spray a blanket email across your management stack the week before the evals are due with the expectation that they will be effective. If management gets the spray with no guidance, it is their responsibility to push the issue back upward and escalate. The reality is that most organizations do not spend a significant amount of effort to prepare leadership/management/employees for the evaluation process. Senior leadership must take an active role in making certain that managers are faithfully executing a well-crafted process else they should not be surprised that the output of the process isn’t useful. If an employee has identified that they do not have clear targets, they must take this up with their direct manager, ideally within the first month of the year. If the manager abdicates their responsibility to create these goals, the next best thing is for the employee to create their own and message upward stating that they have populated their own goals and unless there is a problem, that they will be working toward them. 

The second ingredient is to make sure that once these goals have been developed, they are discussed WEEKLY. If the goals that have been created for the employee are an extension of the stated core values, then not a week should go by without a brief review of these goals! How can the employees be expected to play according to the rules if they don’t know them? A tactic that I have successfully used in the past is to stand up the dreaded weekly summary. While I’ve not found that employees are terribly thrilled by having to produce a Friday summary of their activities, it does keep your goals fresh on their minds. It helps to provide that regular reminder that they have work they should be doing; if they come up empty-handed for a summary on a given week, both the employee and the manager can discuss why that was the case—not in a way that intones guilt or fault, but to ensure that they are not being drawn away from their core tasks by circumstances beyond their control. If an outside team is consuming their time, the manager needs to be aware of this so that they can put an end to such behavior. In order to be effective, the summary should not be a burden and should take no more than 10-15 minutes to complete. The high-level and specific goals should be part of this form and each employee will write a simple statement that describes what they did, how it pertains to the given goal and how it serves the needs of your organization. This weekly summary can be the basis of one-on-one meetings or can simply drive some correspondence so that the employee receives ongoing feedback.

Once the weekly reporting against performance evaluation goals has been established, the midyear and end of year evaluation cycle becomes tremendously easier for both manager and employee. For the employee, instead of digging through old email to determine what accomplishments they have made in the previous six months, they have a concise list of exactly what they’ve done, already pre-aligned against their goals! In essence, they’ve done their reporting one week at a time; they might have to add a narrative summary to tie the events together, but the process sheds the pain and doubt of having to try and remember what they’ve done and if it was what they were supposed to be doing. For the manager, they now have a consistent set of criteria that is rooted in the goals that have been created which they can use to make a more effective determination of performance. 

In the end, performance evaluation does not need to be a stressful practice that does not produce results; it can indeed serve both the employee and the organization. What I've always found odd is that Human Resources has (in my experience) been conspicuously absent from the entire process. If your experience has been different, please do share in the comments!