Tips for performance appraisals - Part 3 of 3

Insights into power and utilities accounting, business processes, and strategies

Build your knowledge | Provide value to your organization | Enhance your career skills

Parts 1 and 2 of this series discuss setting not only your personal goals, but using that approach in helping employees who you evaluate set their goals that align with their career and your organization’s goals. Hopefully the two intersect, but knowing is better than not. This week, we discuss how managing expectation is an art, not a science and asking employees to fill roles that match their skills isn’t always aligned with their goals.

Balancing business and employee needs

?Depending on your area of the country, there may be many other job opportunities for your current employees. While meeting your organization's business needs is critical, recognize that having a career path within your business for their future career will entice employees you wish to keep viewing your organization as integral to their career and personal development. You'll also have those employees filling organizational roles now that may move on and be replaced. Your goal for those employees should be to help them develop their skills during their time with you and have a satisfying work experience.

Things I learned over my 35 years at a professional services firm on helping employees develop their careers and skills:

?1. Recognize that goal-setting covers three main areas – personal, family and business. Successful goal development comes at the intersection of those three areas.

?2. Goals cannot be decided by either the employee or management in a vacuum. Working together is key to success.

?3. Be open to remote employment but have the discussion on career impacts. In person at the office working with a team is always best. In the office, informal discussions and casual information sharing make for team building and morale-boosting. Even before the recent move to remote mass employment, our firm used remote employment when we wanted to keep talent and meet the employee needs. I think remote employment makes it harder on employee retention, but a systematic process with online meeting tools, team events, Slack, other IM tools, and phone discussions helps. You should also have a frank discussion with the employee that working remotely may slow down their career path. Remote work does not lend itself well to developing the relationships you need in an organization to advance your career to higher levels. For many people, that’s ok, but, they should go into the arrangement with their eyes wide-open.

?4. Listen. Maybe you can't make for the ideal career situation, but listening, empathizing, and working within the available parameters is part of your stewardship commitment to being part of management.

?5. Transfer employees within your organization. It hurts, but you're helping the greater good if an employee needs a change in teams or their career skills and goals lie outside your team. Recognize when you must let go to meet employee needs and still keep them within the organization.?

??

Developing goals is a skill that lasts a lifetime

?

We will continue to see changes in the work environment, employment opportunities, and career development. The greater implementation of artificial intelligence tools in some professions may cause employees to reconfigure their career goals. Automating routine business processes is a method for controlling costs and freeing workers to pursue other tasks. AI will lead to re-organizing portions of your organization's workforce and training staff for new roles.?

?

The shift to renewables will impact the operations more than the finance and customer service side in the electric business. Still, there will be opportunities in all areas for employee development.?

?

Helping employees develop their goals is a skill that needs to be worked on as much as any technical skill. It should be started early in your career.

Check out Parts 1 and 2 of this series in my newsletter library. See you next week!

How I Can Assist

Please contact me with any questions, or we can schedule an appointment to discuss your needs in more detail.

Thank you for reading this article. Please send me any suggestions for other topics. I am always looking for ways to address current issues and serve as a resource for utilities and electric cooperatives.

View my website at https://utilityeducationinsights.com/ for more articles on this and other rate and power and utilities financial and accounting topics. Plus, ways that we can assist your co-op or utility with rate, accounting, and financial aspects of the business.

About Russ Hissom - Article Author

Russ Hissom, CPA is a principal of Utility Accounting & Rates Specialists, LLC a firm that provides power and utilities rate, expert witness, and consulting services, and online/on-demand courses on accounting, rates, FERC/RUS construction accounting, financial analysis, and business process improvement services. Russ was a partner in a national accounting and consulting firm for 20 years. He works with electric investor-owned and public power utilities, electric cooperatives, broadband providers, and gas, water, and wastewater utilities. His goal is to share industry best practices to help your business perform effectively and efficiently and meet the challenges of the changing power and utilities industry.

Find out more about Utility Accounting & Rates Specialists here, or you can reach Russ at [email protected].

The material in this article is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as legal or accounting advice provided by Utility Accounting & Rates Specialists. You should seek formal advice on this topic from your accounting or legal advisor.