Every company, partnership, firm, organization and government department has goals. Regardless of whether institutions are profit oriented or non-profitable by purpose and constitution, they are founded by a purpose and strive for the realization of particular goals. Any good company that rarely misses its goals lays emphasis on the specifics of its goals. It sets annual goals and makes sure they are well communicated to the company staff. It also carries out reviews to analyze well efforts to realize such goals are. Mid-year reviews are very crucial. They condense all efforts of a company’s HR department to reorganize the company’s priorities and game plan.
Mid-year performance evaluations are an acknowledgment of success and operation gaps for the first half of the year, and objective fixing for the rest of the year. They ideally present a company’s whole staff with an impeccable period of summarizing, celebrating, challenging and inspiring each other. The fundamental goal of any human resource department should be to optimize the efficiency of the company’s personnel. HR managers should not seem as adversaries to employees but as guides concerned about getting the best out of them. Therefore, mid year reviews should be a concept that attracts anticipation and excitement, not anxiety. Company staff should like such meetings and not revere them. The best way for a human resource manager to achieve maximum reflection, motivation and communication are to categorize the questions into functional units by:
• Asking questions that analyze performance
• Ask turnaround questions
• Ask question that yields feedback on what employees think of particular policies
• Ask questions that draw motivation.
It can be very tough for any manager to know the right kind of questions really to ask to solicit the desired effect. It gives numerous human resource managers a headache when planning mid-year performance evaluation. The best kind of such an assessment should be objective, participatory and non-hostile. It should foster a spirit of teamwork in achieving the company’s goals and not a spirit of internal competition.
Therefore, before conducting such an evaluation, human resource managers should sufficiently communicate with employees that the purpose of the review is to:
• take stock of the position the company is in
• join forces on bringing in ideas and strategies for objective execution
Do not allow your business to continue having hostile mid-year performance evaluations. By all means, make them enjoyable and fruit oriented. A human resource manager should not review staff by ranking them or profiling them with a performance index. An HR manager should make his priority to be talent management. They should analyze the performance of employees by likening the goals of the company to individual strengths and talents and matching them. Under-performing employees should be reminded of the company’s goals, made to understand their role in the achievement of these goals.
Some questions have to be posed to employees at individual levels. They are:
1. What goals have been met so far?
2. What challenges have been re-occurring and are likely to persist
3. What goals still need to be met?
4. Are there any goals that should be considered obsolete or irrelevant?
5. What could be done to make one more efficient?
Much needed interaction with under-performing employees should help HR managers pre-determine what intervention best suits the employee and the company at large. At-risk employees often have something to say that changes the outlook of the HR department and perhaps other agencies like the finance and procurement departments.
All and all, work to create an performance review program that helps employees grow within their positions and careers.
