Performance Review — assessment and review of staff performance

Employee performance review is an important element of the human resource management process. This is a method that allows assessing the work performed by the individual. It usually covers the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the employee’s functioning in the enterprise. It is necessary to perform this activity regularly, as it confirms the relevance and efficiency of staff selection mechanisms and allows to assess the effectiveness of conducted training. In addition, it has its administrative significance regarding pay increases or promotions, and it is also basic information for an employee to help him improve his performance and plan his career. Evaluation of results is often helpful in granting remuneration, filling positions, including granting promotions and dismissals, and also helps formulate guidelines for the assessed employees. It must be carried out fairly and without discrimination. The process of assessing work results is carried out in stages.

Review and Company Values

Performance review is one of the systemic methods for increasing the effectiveness of an organization. Mechanically, to simplify it as much as possible, a review is a retrospective process that allows you to identify “weak” and “strong” places in a company and tighten up “weak” ones. Each employee talks about his results, receives a “rating” and comments on which projects or personal qualities you need to pay attention to (sometimes in the form of general recommendations, but better in the form of specific verified goals).

Benefits of Using Performance Review

With performance review, you can achieve several goals at once:

• evaluate the effectiveness of personnel and determine prospects;
• analyze through feedback, which will allow you to find out the needs, problems, motivation of employees, etc .;
• stimulate staff, introduce incentives (including in the form of salary growth, promotion for the result, training) or fulfill the employee’s request;
• Automating performance review

Make performance evaluations faster and easier for managers to complete, so organizations typically see their participation rates rise dramatically. This means more employees are getting the performance feedback they need. Some solutions can even overcome the issue of computer accessibility for production floor workers, by collecting their input and electronic signature during their performance review, right from their supervisor’s workstation.

Modern HRM systems usually allow you to provide descriptions of ratings, especially BrainyHR allows you to send requests for PA, feedback form and make your own checklists for different departments.

The main advantage of performance review is the opportunity that allows the employee to look at themselves from the outside, and the chance to demonstrate their abilities. It is the “review” that makes it possible to find out how much the employee’s level of competence corresponds to the organization’s goals, whether he is able to achieve the set results, and whether he meets the employer’s expectations. In addition, this method allows you to answer more complex and deeper questions. What prevents an employee from developing effectively in his current position? Is the chosen field of activity suitable for him? What needs to be done to help him prove himself?

Based on the results of the performance review, you can make an objective decision: whether the employee is worthy of material incentives, whether he is ready for a new level of responsibility and how suitable he is for solving the tasks that he faces.

How to give Performance Review

Performance review consists of two stages.

1. The employee independently evaluates his achievements for a certain period in the form of a report (essay) on the work done or answers questions in a given form (previous knowledge test, certification are taken into account).
2. Evaluation of staff occurs through an analysis of activities (each employee’s rating is compiled).

The rating is an assessment according to several criteria: the level of professional skills, labor productivity, contribution to the work of the group, personal contribution (it is possible to vary the evaluation criteria depending on the field of activity of the employee).

All these mechanisms allow you to collect information about the employee, determine his “suitability” and get feedback, which also allows you to evaluate personal qualities. It is the two-pronged approach that provides an objective assessment of the employee’s activities, but it should be remembered that the main purpose of the “review” is not to convict the employee of errors and shortcomings, but to find ways to eliminate them and prevent them in the future.

Specific metrics or kpi

Result indicators (RI) is a number of activities that achieve specific results. They give a clear picture of the company.

An example of result indicators are all financial indicators. The financial result is always the result of certain actions. Sales, logistics, production, quality — these are only some of the departments whose activities affect the final financial result. RIs do not illustrate the effort made by individual units in the company to achieve this result.

PI — Performance Indicators

Performance indicators (PI) are non-financial indicators that can be related to the operation of individual units / teams in a company. An example of performance indicators are all activities that are directly or indirectly affected by individual function teams. Both with RI and PI, we can appoint those that incomparably more closely reflect their significance — and only those we call key. To manage an enterprise composed of many individuals, a common language should be used.

Indicators as a result of measurements allow us to:

• See the progress of painstaking, daily work,
• Focus on what really matters
• Be objective
• Increase the value of decisions made
• Get feedback on action taken
• Involve the right people in specific actions

KPI We can use in all company departments such as marketing, sales, customer service, production, logistics, HR and others

The main benefits of using KPI:

• Adaptation of daily activities to the goals pursued by the organization
• Improving operational efficiency
• Empowering people to change — creating responsibilities
• Real impact on the company’s condition

Criteria and Results

There is no single mechanism capable of objectively evaluating the work of an individual employee or all company personnel. This is due to the variety of methods for calculating the effectiveness, the specifics of the functioning of individual enterprises, the characteristics of the distribution of professional responsibilities assigned to staff, as well as the “portraits” of the ideal employee in a particular organization.

The use of the above assessment systems makes it possible to calculate the level of productivity of an individual employee by adding up the ratings set by various parameters based on the tasks set.

Techniques for assessing employee evaluation

The main assessment techniques include:

1. ranking — ranking employees according to selected criteria from the best to the worst. This is a simple technique, but it should be used only for similar tasks of employees, because with very diverse scope of work results may be non-objective.
2. pair comparison — comparing each employee with each, and then awarding points to those who win in this “competition”. The effect is to create a ranking list. It is very labor-intensive, because with each new employee the number of relationships increases by the number of existing employees.
3. forced distribution technique — an attempt to fit individual employees into the normal distribution of some criterion. Requires assumption of sample representativeness.
4. qualifying scales — determining the intensity of employee characteristics using verbal, point or behavioral scales.
5. free description — a description of the employee’s accomplishments and behavior by the manager. It accurately reflects the quality of the employee’s work, but the possibility of comparisons over time and with other employees is very limited.
6. self-assessment technique — an employee can describe or comment on his / her own assessment.
7. critical event technique — systematic record keeping of employee successes and failures. Entries are periodically reviewed and a judgment is based on them.
8. employee evaluation sheet — the information is collected using a spreadsheet and then converted into a grade using the keys.
9. assessment by setting goals — management by goals in the stage of assessing the achievement of goals gives the opportunity to assess the employee on this basis.
10. personnel portfolio — grouping assessed employees into categories that are strategically important. The analysis is plotted on a diagram resembling a BCG matrix. Specific activities (training, promotion, dismissals, etc.) are adopted for each group.

Errors in performance appraisal

• lack of objectivity — making performance appraisal of all phenomena through the prism of one’s own experiences, beliefs and expectations, suggesting earlier assessments or the perception of the judge in connection with only one fact
• misinterpretation of employee behavior
• based on first impression
• rating based on last impression
• bending general features to your own impressions
• not informing employees about the results of the assessment