Performance evaluations for your employees (and you)

You have employees who come to work, do their jobs and go home. This daily routine happens again and again. You think you are getting your “money’s worth” from their efforts but unless you have some sort of performance evaluation I bet money you are not getting what you really want and need out of their performance.

There are numerous performance evaluation platforms to help get the employee (and you) focused on what is important, including the 360-degree evaluation, the supervisor/employee evaluation, the peer review and many, many others.

Your performance, and those of your employees, should be focused on supporting your short- and long-term goals. The efforts of you and your employees need to be aligned with company, division and department goals.

Performance evaluations, if done correctly, will simply get everyone on the same page. Working with purpose.

So the company gets what it wants with focused energy through performance evaluations, but what about the employee?

Radio station WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) comes into play. Typically a performance evaluation program intimates some sort of monetary (pay increase or bonus) reward if the benchmarks are accomplished. 

Therein lies the rub. Who determines who receives how much of the available pay increase? Too often the employee has one set of expectations and the employer has another. Someone is going to be the bad guy and I bet the bad guy is “the company.”

One performance plan that takes the payment onus off the company is what I refer to as the PMP (Performance Management Plan). 

An example: The components are three behavioral goals and three technical goals to be performed whether quarterly, semi-annually or annually. The frequency of the review can be tailored to the type of company.

I suspect a technology company might need either a monthly or quarterly PMP, while a service company could get by with a less frequent PMP. 

Here is the major difference. Once the behavioral and technical goals are established (with timelines for completion), each goal is given a numeric score. If each goal is determined to be of equal importance (value) then the point total might look something like 90 points (30 each for behavioral goals) and 90 points (30 each for technical goals). If the PMP is determined to be quarterly then the maximum points that can be earned would be 720 (180 points per quarter times four quarters) for the year.

If an employee failed to complete three goals over the course of a year then the maximum amount of increased compensation she/he could earn would be 87.5 percent.