Employee Performance Appraisals – How to measure performance effectively

In a past article, I discussed different methods on how I measure performance. Most organizations measure performance once a year, usually on the date of when that specific employee was hired. These organizations use different performance appraisal results, they track the raters and have other employees scale their peers. The issue with this twofold. First of all, management needs to be very careful when it comes to feedback. The employee that is being rated may not fully understand why they are not up for the promotion that they were hoping for. Secondly, it may cause a rift between employees when they rate one another (Martin, & Bartol, 1998).

In the other article, I have discussed that my method does not use interviews or traditional methods of appraisals. My method takes a simple “point system” approach which we revisit and keep verifying every 90 days.

Deloitte is a great example of a system that is similar. They have found that they spend so many hours wasting their time collecting data to discover how they are doing. Instead, they decided to change how they collect the data, how often they collect the data, and what data points they are going after.

Deloitte has discovered 3 key items that we associated with their highest-performing teams. a) Co-workers were committed to doing high-quality work. b) The mission of the company inspired them. c) The employees have the chance to use their strengths every day. As we see from this research that employees are most engaged when they are able to work with others who are performing just as much as they are, the employees share the company’s vision, goals, and values, and employees want to be able to use their talents and strengths in their jobs – all these motivate the employee and the result is that they will perform at their optimal level (Buckingham, & Goodall, 2015).

Before measuring an employee, it is important to explain to them what it entails. The employee fully understands what they are expecting and what is being measured.

1. The organization makes sure that all the employees are clear of its mission and vision.
2. Each employee has specific targets that they are expected to contribute and are committed to – these targets are aligned with the overall organizational objective.
3. Human Resource management strongly endorses a system that evaluates the performance, they encourage the employees to perform at their optimal level. This is communicated frequently with the employees. 
4. The employee has access to quantitative and qualitative standards that are included within the job descriptions, they are assured that they have access to training and development, and the employees have explained what the reward outcomes are.
5. We keep evaluating the system over and over again in order to maximize its effectiveness. If it needs to be adjusted, we do so as soon as possible.

Below is a diagram that demonstrated visually how this system works (MacLean, 2017). 

Here are some examples of companies that are using performance appraisals in a beneficial and engaging manner to the employees. In the words of Melissa Del Broccolo VP of KIND’s Talent Management. “We can focus on the candidate experience during interviews, on our new team members’ onboarding experience, uncover training opportunities, measure alignment with our values, and clearly understand the rationale when people decide to leave,” explained Melissa (CultureAmp, N.D.). 

Jelly Belly is a family-owned business since 1869 – you can only imagine the type of company this must be. The systems it has in place would be super ancient and would be pretty rigid. However, like every company, Jelly Belly needs to measure the performances of over 600 employees in 3 locations. Margie Poulos, HR Manager of Jelly Belly’s Midwest operations set out to design a new system in which she can measure her employee’s performance. Here is what she says about the new system that she implemented with her team of HR Staff “We’ve always had a separate training manual. Now we can go into the evaluations and more easily monitor employees’ skills development, see what training is needed by individuals, and check the due dates for training and renewal. That makes it much easier for us to keep track” Poulos noted (Saba, N.D).

From the two case studies above we can see that no matter how old or how young a company is, measuring the employees is important – that’s a no-brainer – but the novelty is how we measure and what systems we have in place that will adequately engage the employee which will result in their high-performance.

Yermi Kurkus

Resources:

Buckingham, M. & Goodall, A. (2015). Reinventing Performance Management, Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2015/04/reinventing-performance-management

CultureAmp (N.D.) KIND – Case Study. Retrieved: https://www.cultureamp.com/customers/case-studies/kind/

Martin, D. C. and Bartol, K. M., (1998). Performance Appraisal: Maintaining System Effectiveness. Public Personnel Management, 27(2), 1998. Retrieved from EBSCO multi-search database in the Touro library.(Old but relevant)

MacLean, J. (2017). Performance Management. In The Sage Handbook of Sport Management (pp. 160-180). (Located in presentation section for this course).

Saba (N.D). A sweet employee performance appraisal system for Jelly Belly. Retrieved: https://www.saba.com/resources/case-studies/jelly-belly