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| Yes | 25% | 99 votes | Total: 402 votes | |
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Add to FavoritesA few years ago I worked for a major construction type company. I was the assistant to the department head and also the personnel file keeper. My manager's routine, come review time was to have me pull last year's reviews from my computer files where I had saved them and with minor changes such as date and some changes to job titles, doctor them for the current review period.
When you are told by your manager to take this employee performance review template, duplicate enough copies for all our employees and don't forget to insert each name in the blank; you know that you are not delivering an individualized, well thought out, and relevant to the job being performed, review. Unfortunately in this organization this type of performance review was the standard. When a manager has mishandled their responsibility of delivering to each employee an individualized review of their work performance, said review is a mockery if not a down right insult. Not only should employee performance reviews of this kind be abolished, the manager should be demoted to the mail room as assistant to the assistant mail boy or better yet fired.
The manager had five supervisors under him who were responsible for their work crews that consisted of about fifteen crew personnel. I will admit that this is a lot of people to supervise and to make it easier the company utilized a program called something like "Performance First" - the template. This template was actually pretty slick. You filled in the name of the employee, their job title and the goals or job duties that were to be met. When you had to put in the review of the work being performed the template would fill in the first name of the employee and finish with a canned sentence like, "Bob has fully met the goal of raising company revenue in the first quarter." The program filled in the blanks based on the goals you outlined. This wouldn't have been so bad but seventy-five employees reviews said the same thing, with the exception of a couple who the supervisor determined someway didn't "fully meet" their goals.
The first time this occurred I was new to my position and didn't want to jump to a hasty conclusion. I thought the manager was going to use last year's review in an open discussion with the supervisor being reviewed; a sort of prelude to the actual review with feedback from the employee's last review to generate the final end product. Much to my dismay the manager met with the employee behind closed doors for all of five minutes and presented me with the signed and dated document that I had doctored up for him. "Great, these can be filed now," he said, "all done until next year." The supervisors in turn met with each of their crew personnel and did the same thing. No individual performance review was given, no unique to the person feedback was offered, no strengths or weakness were identified by individual. The whole process was a complete sham. This type of performance review is waste of the manager, supervisor and definitely the employee's time. Not to mention the trees that were wasted in the production of this useless paper.
In my curiosity, I asked a few employees how their review had gone and to a person, they said, "Just fine, same as last year." Did they learn anything from this review that made them a better employee, more adept at their job or did they learn that as long as your name is filled in correctly on the form it's "Just fine, the same as last year." There is nothing illegal about this type of performance review, unethical maybe, but definitely it cries shame on you as a leader. If your job is to manage a company's resources and employees are the major resources of most companies, then you have mismanaged these assets and not performed your duties successfully. You have been dishonest to the employee, because they never received pertinent information about their actual work performance. To use an old cliche, "This is a lose, lose situation for everyone concerned."
Come my review time, I was told to print up one of those same documents. The manager sat me down for all of five minutes and made sure 1. My name was spelled correctly 2. My job title was correct and 3. The date was correct. He asked me if I saw anything else wrong with this document and I said, "Just fine, the same as last year."
Learn more about this author, Barbara Combs Williams.
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No
Employee performance reviews are very valuable, if conducted in the right manner. It should be clear that they are a review and work two ways from the start so employees voicing their opinions about their performance on forms before the review are not made to feel they need to feel they are going to be criticised unduly or that the review is harsh. Instead, a review should be seen as a two way communication procedure.
For us, employee reviews work on several levels.
First, they give us the chance to review the performance of our employees in the roles we have given them. Sometimes, a person may not be performing as we would expect and we need to know why this is, how we can help or if they need training in an area which they may find difficult. Happy employees are much better for us as a company.
It also gives our employees the chance to comment, without fear of comeback, about how the company as a whole uses them. One employee very shyly told me she found it difficult because I spoke so fast she sometimes could not understand what I said and found it hard to keep asking me to repeat myself. This simple fact helped me to understand how I need to talk clearer. In a review she can say these things which would be hard for her to walk up and say to me in the open office.
Another way reviews are very useful is that sometimes, employees come up with great ideas or we discover, in the review, that they would be better if their role was changed a bit. I would rather have productive and happy employees than us train them and they get digruntled and take our training elsewhere.
One secretary told me that she liked her job but she also liked getting involved on the client side of things. This backed up news I had heard from other colleageus that this lady was very good with clients - especially those who many of us found difficult. She always got back to them and one trader said two of his clients asked to speak to her instead of him! We thought about this and when she mentioned it in the review I asked if she might be prepared to undergo some training and think about being a junior ttrader frist, and do some trading for specific products too (thinkingof those involved with the clients who liked her of course!). She jumped at the chance and I was pleased to see her face light up, as I know she enjoyed her job but this way, we kept a darn good secretary and satisfied that part of her willing to have a go at trading. We got more from her and she would feel she could stay with us and see some progress in her career.
This proved a win-win situation and, two years on from her review, she is now a full trader (with secretarial skills which always come in handy!) and her products have hit the roof sales-wise. I was pleased we changed her role and kept a valuable asset for the company.
There is a down side to reviews and this is when an employee uses them as the chance to criticise management from the bottom up. We had one chap who marched in, laid his forms on the desk and took up a defensive stance right from the start - with both arms and legs crossed. He then told us how we were underusing his talents, how he should be deputy head of his department and that if we increased his salary and gave him more perks, he would get our sales up. We asked him for his ideas on how to increase his productivity and he basically said just pay him more. We explained that an employee performance review is just that - it is to review his performance, which, to date, had not been much. We needed to see results before we took the decision to promote, increase pay and change his job title - particularly as he had only been with us 4 months! I also had seen the report on him from his manager which did not support his view that he could increase sales if we gave him more perks- he needed to come up with ideas and strategies, not just financial gain.
Sadly, this particular employee left shortly afterwards - I guess we did not pass his review of us!
Employee performance reviews definitely have their place in companies. They also give management the chance to really get to know who is working for them. If we did not have reviews, we would never have really known how our secretary thought and perhaps that we could use her talents so more productively - we also would not have had the chance to tell our hot-headed young trader that he needed to have ideas and results before demanding more money.
Employee reviews should stay, so long as they are not seen as tests or trials but a two way street.
Learn more about this author, Sammy Stein.
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