On Forbes.com, Jon Picoult discusses the right way to review and evaluate employees' performance.
According to Picoult, one of the most common mistakes that managers make is relying too heavily on employees' self-evaluations.
He explains: "In theory, self-assessments serve a useful purpose. They give employees an opportunity to objectively reflect on their performance, to consider what they've done well and where they've fallen short, and then to share their perspective with their manager.
"But it's not like that in reality. Managers are implored by top executives to conduct thoughtful performance reviews for their own staff - and they find themselves short on time and searching for shortcuts. That's where self-assessments cease to be just a data point and instead practically become the review itself."
Too often, says Picoult, managers content themselves with taking the employee's self-assessment, adding some superficial comments and assigning a final performance rating.
"And people wonder why employees think evaluations are ridiculous," observes the author.
Picoult offers some tips for business leaders to avoid such missed opportunities to effectively evaluate and improve employee performance:
* Make a genuine effort to write evaluations from scratch.
* Keep a diary to provide a set of observations for when it's time to write the review.
* Carefully manage spans of control so managers aren't given an unrealistic number of assessments to make.
* Inspect the reviews for quality and don't be content with just giving a copy to the human resources department.
How To Do Performance Reviews Right
Jon Picoult, Forbes.com, 29/07/09
