Does your appraisal system differentiate between:
'performance standards'
- the criteria against which your company measures your ability to meet what is required of you in your functional and professional capacity (eg producing month end expense reports)
and
'objectives'
concerned with improving the way the job is currently done. ie performance goals (eg identify bottlenecks and enable 50% more data to be processed in the same time)
Richard Rogers
4 Responses
Thoughts on Appraisal
Richard
I am not currently involved in this area, however I do have some views which I thought I would share with you. I believe that you should differentiate between the two, partly because employees may be able to demonstrate the performance standards, without meeting all objectives. The issue of quality of objective setting may cast a shadow over employees skills ie. unrealistic, unclear, etc…
Experience and research shows that managers are notoriously under-skilled and under-trained at objective -setting!
Kay
Important to keep in line
In the first place, I would say it is very important that the objectives are in line with the performance standards. We do this by having the objective setting process cascade through the organisation from the organisational goals i.e. starting with MD to his direct reports and so on.
Appraisal Systems
Hi Richard
I’ve been working with a number of organisations as a consultant on their appraisal systems – everything from design, to training managers and staff, to writing and introducing competencies.
Your question makes me think about the following:
a job description describes the tasks and duties an individual must carry out
a standard is a predetermined level of performance
an objective translates the organisational goals into
where objectives describe what an individual must do, competencies describe how they shoud be carried out.
Is this of any help? If you want to chat please contact me. I have lots of examples of appraisal systems which I could seek permission to share with you if you’re interested.
Regards
Andrea
Treat it as a process
Hi Richard
I like to work with the concepts of “Process Improvement” as laid out by Rummler & Brache in their book of same title. As they try to provide a method for Improving Corporate Performance, they also cover designing & measuring the “Job Performer’s” performance.
If you’d like to contact me directly, I’ll talk you through it in more detail.
Dave