How to evaluate your marketing staff: assessing employee performance leads to quicker attainment of marketing goals

University Business, Jan, 2005 by Bob Sevier

Evaluation is all the buzz these days as colleges and universities seek to more effectively allocate the precious resources of time, talent, and treasure.

In this month's column, we are going to take a look at how to evaluate a marketing staff. As you read along, please realize that my comments are not designed to stand in place of counsel from the professionals in your Human Resource office.

Before we wade in, let's open with a broad question: Why should we bother evaluating our marketing staff? For the larger institution and the individual, timely and thoughtful evaluations:

* Are a key element of stewardship and accountability. On most campuses, dollars are tight, and showing how you have wisely invested all your marketing resources--including people--will help pave the way for more resources in the future.

* Are increasingly expected in higher education. We expect outcome data on students, we expect data on the effectiveness of our recruiting efforts, and we expect a certain level of performance from our advancement team. Marketing is no different.

* Build professionalism and trust among your marketing team members and between the team and other administrators and faculty.

* Help staff remain focused on their contribution to larger institutional goals.

* Make people better. They will emerge from an evaluation with a clearer sense of where they are, where they need to go, and the resources available to help them.

* Build individual and team confidence.

Susan Shea, vice president of University ReLations at Santa Clara University (Calif.) believes that evaluations should be both forward-looking and review past performance. Says Shea, "Carefully planned evaluations organized around agreed-upon measures of success provide marketing professionals with the tools they need for prioritizing their work. As a campus becomes more adept at marketing, the review allows the evaluator to recalibrate the goals, and assess the ability of the marketing staff to grow into new leveLs of accomplishment."

WHY IT IS SOMETIMES DIFFICULT TO EVALUATE MARKETING STAFF

Of course, evaluating your marketing staff is not always easy. Aside from general awkwardness that occurs during any evaluation, Mike Norris, director of Communications at Centre College (Ky.), reminds us, "Evaluation can sometimes be difficult because the evaluator is in the middle of the creative sessions, sleeves rolled up, working in tensely with the other marketers, trying to break out of the box and come up with something realty good. The shared time in the trenches creates a bond that can later get in the way of objective evaluations. You sometimes have to change from blue jeans back into a business suit and judge the results and the work performance from a fair but rigorously analytical point of view."

Robert Smith, president of Slippery Rock University (Pa.), has an other take. He says that it can be difficult to clarify a single individual's contribution to the Larger results of a marketing campaign. "Our attempt to stilt give credit to the individual begins with a cascading method of holding each level of our operation responsible based on how much of the campaign was within their domain of operation," says Smith. "Consequently, we hold the chief marketing officer accountable for the campaign and then he or she provides the evaluation for each division on down the Line. By example, the publication person's evaluation is focused on what she did as part of the team but specifically what she did in Leading the print dimension of the campaign."

DEVELOPING AN EFFECTIVE STAFF EVALUATION PROGRAM

Developing an effective evaluation program is not that difficult. Sometimes we use evaluations to badger staff when things are not going well. Good staff will not and should not tolerate this kind of behavior. A better reason (and perhaps the only good reason) for staff evaluation is to assess and improve performance with the idea that individual improvement leads to group improvement and quicker marketing goal attainment. But there is an important subtlety going on here. To improve performance means you must be interested in increasing the abilities and competencies of your people. We'll touch on that again Later. Remember: It is often more important to evaluate work product than work style. Sometimes evaluators can't get rid of the "this is how it is done" mentality when, in fact, there are many ways to accomplish some thing. Don't confuse style with substance.

Second, have an open mind when conducting a performance evaluation. Supervisors should go into a performance evaluation with the goal of creating an atmosphere where an honest exchange of information between the employee and the employer is possibLe. It's a time for dialogue.

Next, your evaluations must be regular and based upon mutually agreed-upon criteria. ReguLar means yearly in most cases, perhaps twice yearly for new people or staff that are having difficulties. It is also important to establish the criteria upon which the evaluation is based. Typically, an evaluation covers two broad areas: