People Strategies: Performance reviews deserve long-term attention

Linda Bower is a speaker, executive coach and human performance improvement consultant in Rogersville.

Anyone who has been through a performance review knows how unfair they can be. It's tough to work unbelievable hours, put heart and soul into a job, then walk into a review to find that the boss hasn't been paying attention, or worse, hasn't respected the strides that have been made.

On the other hand, it's no fun to prepare and conduct a performance review, either. A manager has to face the employee with personal impressions of an employee's performance. This is a huge responsibility that often is overlooked by people in management positions. The quality of a performance review is solely on the shoulders of the manager.

Managers who give performance reviews often do three things wrong: they don't set realistic goals and don't renegotiate them throughout the year; they wait until the last minute to prepare a performance review; and they fall prey to common pitfalls in rating employee behavior.

According to Wilson Learning Worldwide's program, "Managing Human Performance," there are nine errors that managers frequently make when evaluating employee performance.

Accuracy of recall A manager's memory of an employee's performance may not be accurate. If relying on memory alone, and without a record of observations, a manager's memory may distort the actual event and the performance rating may be wrong.

Halo effect One very outstanding characteristic may determine the rating of all other dimensions of an employee's performance. The result will be distortion, positive or negative, of the evaluation of less prominent aspects of the employee's performance.

Contrast This is when a manager compares the employee with someone else, instead of rating him on his own merits. By contrasting performance in this way, a manager may see an employee's performance as better or worse than it actually is.

Stereotyping In stereotyping, the individuality of a person is ignored and he is seen as behaving in a way that is perceived as characteristic of a particular group. Stereotyping can result in a three-way error. First, a manager imputes behaviors to that employee which he does not demonstrate. Second, a manager imputes behaviors to a group that it does not demonstrate.And third, a manager overlooks the actual on-the-job behaviors of the employee.

Differences in standards The standards a manager uses for rating an employee's performance may be unique to the manager and different from the performance standards commonly accepted by other managers in the organization, or the manager may apply standards differently to different employees. This lack of uniformity in performance standards will result in ratings that will be interpreted incorrectly by others in the organization.

Fixed impression An earlier impression of an employee may remain fixed in a manager's mind and color later observations. In effect, a manager will continue to see the employee as he was, rather than as he is now. Ratings based on fixed impressions will be wrong.

Time effects A manager uses the most recent observations to rate an employee, rather than considering all of the employee's behaviors during the rating period. Or a manager allows a memory of recent events to distort recall of earlier ones.

Projection A manager sees his own characteristics in others and rates them according to his feelings about those characteristics. The employee in question may actually be very different from the manager. Projection prevents a manager from seeing the employee as he actually is.

Inference A manager draws conclusions about an employee's behaviors which are not based on actual observations, or which are based on limited behavioral observations. A manager then bases his ratings on these conclusions.

If managers don't document employee behaviors when they happen, they are not doing right by the employee, and the managers are leaving themselves vulnerable to criticism, disloyalty and lawsuits.

I know it's difficult to do. Try creating a worksheet and put it in a daily planner or wherever it is easily accessible. Include something like these categories: employee name, date of behavior sample, basic description of performance behavior, skills involved, expectations/goals/objectives affected, and comments/action taken.

Collect these worksheets through the year, then at review time, you'll have no worries.

Remember, employees immediately know the difference between a well-prepared performance review and one that was put together at the last minute.