Evaluating employees the right way - Personnel - Brief Article

Employee evaluation should start early, when management, using a focused selection process, chooses the right person for the job, argues Daniel O. Lybrook, associate professor of organizational leadership and supervision, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind. "In a more perfect world, all employees would begin their orientation by being shown around, not just where the break room is, but also where the real culture and history of the business or organization lives. The new hire needs to know not just what the company espouses, but also the truth about what it really values. This requires organizational self-awareness and reflection. A good evaluation process is knitted into everything--job expectations, career path, compensation, [and] advancement--in a healthy organization. It is important to the employee to understand what he or she is to give and to get."

Talk to most managers, and they will say that evaluations dived them from the real work of the company--producing and making money. Talk to most employees, and they will say management doesn't evaluate or does a poor job of it. So why don't more businesses use the employee evaluation process more effectively? Lybrook says that, on a basic human level, people don't like to be evaluated themselves, so they tend not to like evaluating others. "Many managers view the process itself as threatening and leading to conflict on interpersonal and organizational levels. One way to reduce potential conflict is to avoid it. This leads to the once-a-year `You did a good job. See you next year' syndrome."

He maintains that short-term demands on managers to produce keep employee performance reviews from being a more meaningful long-term evaluative and developmental tool. "Evaluations tend to be an unexamined part of the corporate culture. They aren't seen as contributing to the company's bottom line."

Lybrook points to some pitfalls leading to ineffective evaluations:

* Routine evaluations are often not tied to promotion or advancement. Because of this, neither management nor employees tend to take them seriously.

* If employee evaluations are tied to upward mobility in the organization, they can create competition among employees. This can lead to a centralizing tendency in which everyone gets a three or four on a five-point scale.

* With the recency effect, employees are judged on what they did last week instead of last year or last quarter.

* Under the "Lake Woebegone effect," all the employees are rated above average.

How can organizations evaluate employees effectively? "Employers and employees need to be clear going into the evaluation process what they want the outcomes to be," Lybrook stresses. From a managerial point of view, what a good evaluation process accomplishes is that the employee clearly understands the organization's goals and how to orient his or her work toward accomplishing them. From the employee's point of view, evaluations should encourage organizational involvement and present opportunities for career and personal growth through contributing to the achievement of organizational goals. Accordingly, management should take a measured, threefold, quantitative approach to evaluation--what the employee is doing, how the organization can do it better, and what the rewards will be for achieving these goals.

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