Real-Time Performance Reviews

Too many bosses are so fearful of conflict or hurting people’s bad behaviour and poor performance even when it’s detrimental to the organization.

On the list of things that are done for all the wrong reasons in organizations, performance reviews would have to near the top.

They end up being “Check the boxes” exercises that have little influence on performance because they take place after the fact the typical performance review is the equivalent of landing an airplane and asking, “Now, where are we?” It’s a little in the game for that question.

One of the worst things about reviews is the use of numerical values to rate performance. You have probably met more than one manager who refuses to give the highest rating to anyone using the excuse, “I don’t believe in giving perfect scores.” Recently an employee of a major corporation related the bizarre example of this attitude he experienced in his most recent performance review. After the end of the evaluation, his manager said. “Nobody scores that high!” and then proceeded to lower the employee’s scores.

If the scale is 1 to 5 and no one ever gets a 5. then that means you ‘re a lousy manager. Why can’t the people who report to you ever hit the mark? What’s sad is that the boss who is afraid to acknowledge that someone has met or exceeded expectations never understands why people quit trying to meet or meet expectations, If you never give 5 (or even a 4) when it’s deserved, you create a culture where 3 becomes your standard of excellence. Mediocrity is not only acceptable, it’s as good as it gets.

On the flip side is the failure to let someone know that they’re just not getting the job done. Too many bosses are so fearful of conflict or hurting people’s feelings that they ignore bad behaviour and poor performance even when it’s detrimental to the organization. Once people understand that no one will ever call their hand when they fail to meet expectations, the tail starts wagging the dog. Guess what happens when a supervisor gives a 3 or a 4 when the employee deserves to be shown the door? Pretty soon you end up with a group of employees that makes the three stooges look competent.

The annual review is not going to go away, but the real performance review should be taking place in real time every day. Good or bad performance needs to be recognized immediately and consistently. The manager’s role should be like that of a fight instructor. The employee’s role is like that of a student. The instructor and student fly side-by-side.

CLEARLY DEFINE EXPECTATIONS

First there has to be a flight plan with clearly defined expectations. To establish the plan, as manager you should ask your employees to complete a list of expectations of their job from their perspective. This should include what they believe their responsibilities are and what authority they possess. You should do the same from your perspective, Then, set up a discussion to reconcile the two lists until both are in agreement. You also need to learn what the employees believe they need from you to successfully do their job.

MEASURE BEHAVIOUR, VALUES, AND SKILLS

As well as establishing these expectations, you should complete assessments to measure behaviour, values, and skills required for the job. Then your employees should complete corresponding assessments to see how they compare. This establishes a benchmark that helps you understand their strengths and helps you understand how to capitalize on these strengths. It also identifies areas that need strengthening. It’s important to remember that the employees have to be a good behavioural fit for the job. No amount of coaching can remake people into something they are not.

COMMUNINCATE CONSTANTLY AND CONSISTANTLY

Now, that there is a fight plan in place. It is your responsibility to provide a system and process for constant and consistent communication. You have to coach the employees, not just evaluate their performance to keep the plane on course. In my first job out of college, my sales manager called me every Monday morning. His questions included: “What’s going on?” How are doing? What can I help you with?” This provided him with what he needed to know to help me do my job. It provided me with the help I needed do my job.

PROVIDE SPECIFIC FEEDBACK

When employees meet or exceed expectations. tell them they are on course. Be specific. There is nothing in the world that will inspire them more to keep doing  a great job than to hear from the boss that you are doing a great job. The only exception is when those words are either insincere or untrue.

When employees fail to meet expectations, you need to tell them that they are off course again, be specific. If they don’t hear what you need to improve on, the only assumption to make that they are doing what you should be doing — or you don’t  care what they do. I know of a case where employees describe their manager as a wonderful person but do not think he is a good manager. They like him but dislike working for him because he gives them no direction. They feel like they are flying blind. This creates a high level of anxiety for the employees and the manager.

CHOOSE YOUR DIRECTION

Employees need and want direction. How and when it is done is what makes the difference — for the employee, for the boss, and for the organization. Like flying a plane, reviewing performance should be a matter of constant course adjustments.  If you wait until the end of the flight to make adjustments to the course, you will always be disappointed with where you land. Worse yet, someone else will probably be sifting through the wreckage to figure out why the plane crashed.

Why Emotional Intelligence is Important

For most people, emotional intelligence is more important then one’s intelligence to attain success in their lives and careers. As individuals, our success depends on our ability to read other people ‘s signals and react appropriately to them. Therefore, each one of us must develop the mature emotional intelligence skills required to better understand, empathize, and negotiate with other people, particularly in our global economy. Otherwise, success will elude us in our lives and careers.

“Your EQ (emotional intelligence quotient) is the level of your ability to understand other people, what motivates them and how to work co-operatively with them,” says Howard Gardner, the influential Harvard theorist.

UNDERSTANDING THE FIVE CATEGORIES OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

1. Self-awareness:

The ability to recognize an emotion as it happens is the key to your EQ Developing self-awareness requires tuning in to your true feelings. If you evaluate your emotions, you can manage them. The major elements of self-awareness are:

  • Emotional awareness: your ability to recognize your own emotions and their effects
  • Self-confidence: sureness about your self-worth and capabilities

2. Self-regulation:

You often have little control over when you experience emotions. You can, however, have some say in how long an emotion will last by using a number of techniques to alleviate negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, or depression, often recasting a situation in a more positive light. Self-regulation involves:

  • Self-control: managing disruptive impulse
  • Trustworthiness: maintaining standards of honestly and integrity
  • Conscientiousness: taking responsibility for your own performance
  • Adaptability: handling change with flexibility.
  • Innovation: being open to new ideas

3. Motivation

To motivate yourself for any achievement requires clear goals and a positive attitude. Although you may be predisposed to be negative, you can with effort and practice, learn to think more positively. If you catch negative thoughts as they occur, you can re-frame them in more positive terms, which will help you achieve your goals. Motivation is made up of:

  • Achievement drive: your constant striving to improve or to meet a standard of excellence
  • Commitment: aligning with the goals of the group or organization
  • Initiative: readying yourself to act on opportunities
  • Optimism: pursuing goals persistently despite obstacles and setbacks

4. Empathy

The ability to recognize how people feel is important to success in your life and career. The more skilled you are at discerning the feelings behind other’s signals, the better you can control the signals you send them. An empathetic person excels at:

  • Service orientation: anticipating, recognizing, and meeting client’s needs
  • Developing others: sensing what others need to progress and bolstering their abilities
  • Leveraging diversity: cultivating opportunities through diverse people
  • Political awareness: reading a group’s emotional currents and power relationships
  • Understanding others: discerning the feelings behind the needs and wants of others

5. Social skills

Developing good interpersonal skills is crucial to success in your life and career. In today’s cyber culture, you can have immediate access to technical knowledge. Therefore, you must possess a high EQ to better understand, empathize, and negotiate with others in the global economy. Among the most useful skills are:

  • Influence: wielding effective persuasion tactics
  • Communication: sending clear messages
  • Leadership: inspiring and guiding groups and people
  • Change catalysis: initiating or managing change
  • Conflict management ability: understanding, negotiating and resolving disagreements
  • Ability to build bonds: nurturing instrumental relationships
  • Collaboration and co-operation: working with others toward shared goals
  • Team building: creating group synergy in pursuing collective goals

How well you do in your life and career is determined by both IQ and EQ. IQ alone is not enough; EQ also matters. In fact, psychologists generally agree that among the ingredients for success, IQ counts for roughly 10% (at best 25%); the rest depends on everything else-including EQ. A study of Harvard graduates in business, law, medicine, and teaching showed a negative or zero correlation between an IQ indicator (entrance exam score) and subsequent career success.

 

Tips for Conducting Employee Evaluations

Employee evaluations are among the most difficult staff management aspects of any supervisor’s job. Even if you’re a seasoned professional accustomed to conducting regular performance reviews, judging your employees’ performance and communicating your findings to them can be stressful – especially with anxious employees. And if you’re new to the job or the company, being the “newbie” who delivers feedback can pose an extra challenge.

It’s important to recognize employee evaluations for what they are: opportunities to have a dialog about progress and performance in a one-on-one setting. They’re valuable tools that allow supervisors to acknowledge improvements in an employee’s performance, as well as his individual contributions to a company’s success. When necessary, it’s also the time to discuss areas where an employee could improve and offer suggestions to do so. An employee gains insights into his supervisor’s perception of his performance and receives acknowledgement for his achievements. This is his chance to discuss strengths and weaknesses, and to see how his progress fits into his overall professional goals.

The Evaluation Procedure

Though frequency and methods vary from company to company, evaluation procedures generally consist of three steps:

  1. gathering and recording performance data
  2. evaluating that data
  3. communicating findings to the employee

As a supervisor, you possess the key to making evaluations a success: superior communication skills. It’s your responsibility to lead the conversation and ensure its tone is optimistic, objective and open in order to foster a cooperative atmosphere that allows both parties’ points to be expressed effectively.

Evaluation Tips

Some companies provide supervisors with strict guidelines on performance evaluation; others allow managers to implement those techniques they deem most fit.

Whatever the situation, you can streamline your procedure and make it more effective.

  • Decide on an evaluation system. Depending on your field, employees’ performance measurements may vary from sales numbers and production output to customer satisfaction ratings and client retention. Determine the most telling aspects of performance assessment for the situation and decide how, and how often, to gather data. For example, if you’re a sales manager, you can keep daily records of each employee’s sales and review them each quarter.
  • Let your employee know she’s being evaluated. Always inform the employee that she’s being evaluated. Explain to her what aspects of his performance are under review; how you will gather data; and how often you will evaluate.
  • Keep records diligently. Most companies have tracking systems to record certain aspects of performance such as sales or project completion. However, you can also note numerous small and large things on a daily basis. Did a certain employee provide a solution to a problem that had the rest of the team stumped? Did he go out of his way to finish a monthly report on time? Did she work effectively with another colleague to develop a more streamlined workflow? Keep a weekly or monthly file on each employee with notes on both positive and negative observations.
  • Ensure the evaluation is an accurate reflection of the entire term. When you track an employee’s performance and review your files on a regular basis, you’ll be in a better position to present a comprehensive review with accurate feedback during actual evaluation meetings. Don’t make the mistake of focusing solely on the last week or month before the meeting.
  • Don’t let personality get in the way. Whether you get along with the employee or not, you should never let personality differences get in the way of an objective assessment. You should review only behaviors, actions and performance. Whether you appreciate the employee’s sense of humor or shyness is irrelevant. Maintain a professional attitude and present your findings in an objective manner from the company’s point of view. If you observe yourself or the employee becoming frustrated, upset or angry, reiterate the objectives of the review, suggest a short break and resume the meeting when both parties are calmer.
  • Keep the tone constructive. Negative feedback is never easy to deliver or receive, so deliver yours in the most positive manner possible. Refrain from comparing the employee’s performance to that of a colleague; instead, use company goals as a benchmark.
  • Leave room for dialog. A performance review isn’t a one-way street. Allow the employee to his voice concerns and observations, as well as his short- and long-term objectives. In addition, ensure there’s room for the employee to add to your review if necessary. For example, if you’ve omitted to note actions or achievements the employee valued highly, make sure he has room to communicate them. When both parties understand what achievements the other values and what the respective goals are, it becomes easier to determine an effective workflow.

A smart supervisor knows how to get the best out of her people at all times. With a strategic approach to employee evaluations, you create a win-win for your company’s objectives and your employees’ careers.

How to Manage High & Low Performers

People who invest their money wisely focus on the investments that have the greatest chance of turning out to be winners. Do you do the same when managing the performance of your employees? If you are sadly like most managers, the answer is you probably get caught up spending too much time with low performers who have a fair chance of being acceptable but not stars. What would happen if y0u dedicated more time to your employees who are acceptable performers yet exhibit clear signs of being high performers? The answer is that many of these acceptable performers will move into the ranks of high performers.

As a CEO, manager, or business owner, how do you identify the employees to focus on, and how can you make the most of your lower performers?

1. Be selective about whom you focus on

Carefully select who will be important for you to invest your time, energy, and other resources in to develop their performance. This decision is incredibly important. If you choose a low performer, your likely payoff will be less than if you select a high performer. This may seem at odds with what you have learned in the past, or it may even seem to go against the grain of democracy or fighting for the underdog. However, if your goal is to maximize performance, then this approach is more likely to yield grater results more quickly.

Anyone can really improve only two or three things at a single time, no matter what multitaskers tell you. Deliberately practicing two or three things is what drives high impact gains in performance and productivity, and that practice can be enhanced with explicit, targeted feedback from mangers. It is far easier, more rewarding, and more effective to leverage strengths rather than focusing on weaknesses. The key is to find strength in one area in the performer and get them to use that strength in an area that requires improvement. Real, sustained improvement takes time. As a manager, you require patience as you need to focus on the long term and not just quick fix. The quicker the fix, the less sustainable the result.

2. Keep hope alive for all performers

Keep hope alive for all performers, even those who are chronically low. What does this mean? As a manager or CEO, you want to make investments, though not equal investments, in all performers. But do not waste a lot of time, energy, and other resources on your employees who, at their very best, will only be average or acceptable performers. These are not bad people or bad fits for your company or not worthy of salary or slackers; they may simply be comfortable in their current position and have no desire to become the company superstar.

A manager who wants to improve performance should demonstrate what psychologists call “unconditional positive regard”. This means that you accept where your staff begins their performance improvement journey: Some may begin behind; others at the right place; and some even ahead. Assess the starting place but do not judge. Then, you can identify the signature strengths of all of your staff, even chronic low performers.

Watch out for the “Pygmalion effect” of your staff rising or falling to meet your expectations. In other words, if you have low expectations, they will move to meet your low expectations; if you have high expectations; your employees will move to meet your high expectations.

Focus on making progress toward a longer term goal and reward that progress, even if it is only one baby step after another. By rewarding small steps towards the larger performance goal, you will also feel less frustration because you know your efforts with the low performers are paying off.

3. Address chronic low performers

Cut your losses early. As a manager or CEO, you are responsible to your boss or stockholders, to your company, and to your customers. There are two ways to address chronic low performers. If, after setting clear expectations, monitoring their performance, coaching them, and then letting them know about the consequences of underperforming, you still see no improvement, you should let them go.

If your company cannot afford to let any employees go to keep the operation running, the second way to address the issue is to reassign chronic low performers. When you reassign an employee, you protect the majority of those who are performing well from smaller group that could persuade them to lower performance across the board of distract the higher performers.

Picture yourself three to six months from now after experimenting with these three recommendations. Not only will you have a plan for all performers, but you will have dedicated more time, energy, and resources to those performers with the greatest payoff. Your time is precious; you can focus on only so much. You have to be selective about what you focus on. When you are responsible for managing performance, prioritize and be confident knowing that your investment will pay off for you, your company, and your customers.

 

Five Tips for Hiring Seasonal Workers

It’s very common for organizations to look to the support of seasonal temporary workers to during peak production times. In fact, hiring seasonal workers on a temporary basis can be one of the best ways to realize a positive return on investment for your business because it’s less costly than hiring regular employees.

Each year, major retailers hire seasonal temps to help out during the holidays and support increased shopping demands. The biggest industries that use seasonal help are manufacturing, retail, hospitality, customer service, sales, and shipping and transportation. However, any company may choose to hire seasonal temps to cover summer vacations or maternity leaves for regular employees.

Seasonal assignments may last for a few days to a few months, depending on the need of each organization. During this time, it’s up to the company to provide training and supervision so that seasonal temps have the ability to be productive. There are some key ways that any business can get the most from their temporary seasonal staff.

  1. Create accurate seasonal job descriptions. Your first step in maximizing seasonal staff ROI is to write seasonal job descriptions that clearly spell out the tasks and responsibilities of each assignment. Your seasonal workforce may have limited time to get projects completed, so make sure they are reasonable given the scope of work.
  2. Provide training and resources to get the job done. Set up all seasonal work stations and systems in advance to make sure you get the more out of seasonal temps. Arrange for an orientation and training day, utilizing your seasoned employees as mentors to seasonal staffers. Give your seasonal workforce access to the information and resources to be successful.
  3. Set clear goals and deadlines for tasks and projects. Your seasonal workers can only accomplish what you expect if you communicate this to them. Provide seasonal temps with a list of tasks they are to complete, along with daily and weekly goals. Provide reasonable deadlines for getting things done.
  4. Give seasonal workers incentives to perform to highest standards. Seasonal workers often respond well to short-term incentives because they may not have access to the same benefits as your regular employees. Set fun contests and provide bonuses for top performers. Give seasonal workers incentives such as on-site lunches, wellness services, and discounts for merchandise.
  5. Treat seasonal workforce with respect and offer some permanent jobs. The reason why some individuals take on seasonal work is to prove their worth for future employment consideration. Remember to treat all seasonal workers with respect and appreciation, offering a few the opportunity to become permanent employees based on their performance. You can find out who may be interested in perm placement by talking with your staffing agency.

Seasonal workers can be a valuable way to stay on top of busy production periods and project demands. Remember to make the most of your seasonal staffers by giving them rewarding assignments and interesting tasks.