Employee performance is a key to business success. When you hire an employee to fill any given job, you choose the candidate who offers the best potential to succeed. But just as you maintain your capital equipment to keep it running in top condition, your staff’s success is another component of your capital investment that requires a maintenance plan as well.

The best way to put that plan into action is by doing performance appraisals. They provide the necessary feedback and coaching to help employees be motivated, do better, and accomplish more toward making your company thrive.

But just like any other tools, performance appraisals work best after you read the instructions and master their operation. With similar care and practice, you can transform the process of conducting them from a daunting task that many managers and supervisors would rather avoid, into a versatile expedient for building and maintaining your company’s success.

Be prepared

Before you can even think about assessing an individual employee’s performance, several key components should already be in place:

1. Define the nuts and bolts. The best way to accomplish this is by providing a written job description or position profile to each employee.
2. Communicate expectations for job performance to employees, including any pre-defined company or customer standards.
3. Be sure to understand each employee’s qualifications and abilities to ensure that your expectations are realistic.
4. Review and understand any legal or regulatory requirements.
5. As an evaluator, observe employees’ work execution and performance against established criteria frequently. Consider maintaining a “critical incident” log to track significant events and behavior.
6. Provide continual feedback to employees appropriate to any given situation. It’s much better to deal with a problem when it happens, than to let it become a more serious concern. And although good performance is often overlooked, it’s equally important to recognize it. When delivering feedback, both negative and positive, use specific examples to support your comments.

The performance appraisal

About 75% of North American companies conduct some type of regular review of their employees’ performance. Such appraisals work best as a reinforcement of (but never a substitute for) your ongoing efforts to manage staff performance. After all, helping your team grow is not a once-a-year task, it’s a full-time proposition.

However, there are many positive reasons to go one step further by streamlining your regular initiatives into a formal review, including:

• Find out in more depth how people are doing in their jobs
• Reinforce feedback to employees about how they’re doing
• Motivate staff
• Create or revise job and personal objectives
• Encourage employee feedback and dialogue
• Strengthen the relationship between managers or supervisors and their direct reports
• Determine training needs
• Evaluate employees for promotion
• Review employee compliance with government, health, safety and environmental regulations (essential in a regulated industry like printing).
• Identify areas that need improvement and what needs to be done to fix them.

There are many methods for conducting performance appraisals. At PrintLink, we recommend the more structured approach of arranging a one-on-one meeting for each employee. As preparation, we encourage you to review the many excellent resources in the business section of your local bookstore – many with strategies, organizational plans and sample forms that can save you hours of time in “re-inventing the wheel.” Briefly stated, here are some helpful guidelines:

For each meeting, chose a place and schedule that are most conducive to constructive dialogue. Allow enough time for meaningful discussion. Respect your time together and don’t let anything intrude on your private meeting.

Keep a positive spin on the exercise. Do everything possible to reinforce the two overall aims of: (1) providing motivational feedback and (2) finding ways to help both the employee and the company achieve their goals and make improvements.

Use the opportunity to raise staff morale. Since job security is a concern for most employees, this is a good time to reaffirm their strengths and tell them how much you value their contributions to your business. A respected leader’s appreciation is a powerful motivator.

However, you must also let them know when they’re not performing to acceptable standards. Relaying criticism constructively is essential to open, trusting communication.

Avoid surprises! Significant events or behaviors, especially negative ones, should already have been discussed with the employee beforehand.

Next month’s column will continue a list of guidelines for conducting performance appraisals.

Victoria Gaitskell is a placement specialist with PrintLink, a professional placement firm for the graphic communications industry.
T: 1 877 413-2600 E: vgaitskell@printlink.com