Evaluating Employee Performance Essay

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Introduction

Different companies evaluate workers differently. Some organizations base the evaluation on the quality of the tasks that the employees are assigned against job description. Others use the behavior of employees at the workplace and towards the customers. Furthermore, some organizations use traits such as attitude of employees in evaluating employee performance.

The company’s main points of concern in regard to the company’s current evaluation form are friendliness, workspace neatness, and attitude. Friendliness, as performance evaluation criteria, assesses performance of employee in respect to the relationships among the company employees.

The company evaluates its workers by analyzing how friendly an employee is to other employees at the workplace. Workers who are unfriendly to other workers are graded low on the friendship scale.

The workspace neatness of the employees is also considered during the performance evaluation. The company assesses the general neatness of employees’ workspace. Workers who have neat and well-organized workspaces are rated highly on the neatness scale and those with cluttered, disorganized, and un-neat workspace are rated low on the neatness scale.

Finally, the company uses worker traits; such as attitude in the performance evaluation. The evaluating managers consider employee personality and attitude towards co-workers and the supervisors.

Positive attitude to co-workers and supervisor coupled with respect for the supervisor attracts high performance rating. On the other hand, poor attitude towards co-workers and supervisors or managers is rated low during the performance evaluation of the company of employee.

Employee performance evaluation is a complex thing that should not be ignored. There are circumstances under which performance evaluations are thought to be unfair and biased by employees. Employees are more concerned by with the quality of the evaluation in consideration than the process affects their promotion and increases in salaries.

Therefore, companies today have placed emphasis on performance evaluation criteria that are fair and unbiased at the same time (Robbins, 2009). Performance evaluation uses criteria such as trait, behavior, and job results. Traits that are related to job performance are evaluated.

According to Robbins (2009), such traits include employee aggressiveness, attitude, reliability, initiative, and personality. Employee behavior can be rated as being effective or ineffective. Organizations rate behavior as either being effective or ineffective depending on results that the behavior produces. Finally, job results are evaluated by ascertaining the quality of job results performed by an employee (Robbins, 2009).

Traits criteria have a relative value in the determination of performance based on the traits of employees. On the other hand, behavior evaluation values the dimensions that are specific to certain behavior of individual.

The behavior and task criteria have the value of clearly bringing out the actual importance of job success to the managers. The common value of the criteria is to enable the management plan for the proper job performance outlines (Robbins, 2009).

Pros and cons of engaging supervisors, peers, and subordinates when evaluating performance

360-degree feedback is a performance evaluation method that utilizes feedbacks from multi-sources. There are advantages that come with this evaluation including supervisors, peers, and subordinates in performance evaluation.

Firstly, inclusion of peers, subordinates, and supervisors help managers get performance feedbacks from a different source thereby eliminating bias that is usually present from single sources (Armstrong, 2012). Additionally, employees, managers, supervisors become aware of their competences and how relevant they are to the organization.

It also gives the subordinates and supervisors “a more rounded view of their performance” (Armstrong, 2012) thereby contributing to improvements.

In addition, the feedbacks that include the opinions of the supervisors, peers, and subordinates in performance evaluation help an individual to understand how their fellow colleagues perceive them in the present as compared to previous periods.

Furthermore, performance results that are generated by allowing the participation of subordinates, peers, and supervisors have greater validity as compared to self-rating (Armstrong, 2012).

On the other hand, including peers, subordinates, and supervisors in the feedback has some disadvantages. The whole process is bureaucratic and thus may undermine the process of performance evaluation (Armstrong, 2012). In addition, this whole process may not produce the best feedbacks as expected.

In this case, some people do not provide genuine feedbacks regarding the issues in question and participants may be biased in their assessments. The process may also result to stress and low morale among some individuals on receiving the feedbacks of the evaluation. Finally, the whole process does not institute follow-up actions after the feedbacks have been revealed (Armstrong, 2012).

Comparison of Performance evaluation methods

After collecting the performance data, organizations usually analyze the data using different methods. The three most commonly used methods are graphical rating scale, Behavioral anchored rating scale (BARS), and employee comparison method (Schermerhorn, 2012).

Employee comparison method ranks the performance of all employees. This is achieved by comparing the performance of each worker. The ranking takes different forms such as alteration ranking and paired comparison.

Alternate assessment simply compares employees to one employee who receives highest ranking. The other employees are ranked from the second best to the worst performer. Paired ranking requires assessors to compare each employee in the group, and the each employee count is calculated into percentages that are finally used to rank the employee (Schermerhorn, 2012).

Graphical rating scale rates employee performance using different dimensions. The rating scale can use numbers or adjectives to rate the performance. The rating scale under this method is marked from task performance being unsatisfactory to being outstanding.

For instance, employee performance can be put on a scale of one (one) to ten (10) whereby adjectives such as satisfactory, above average, average, and unsatisfactory are used to describe the quality of task performance (Schermerhorn, 2012).

Behavioral anchored rating scale (BARS) rates the desired behaviors that are necessary for successful performance of tasks. Assessors are required to assess employees and rate them according to different job performance dimensions with respect to their behaviors (Schermerhorn, 2012).

The rating of behavior can be poor, average, or excellent. The rating scale is anchored on each dimension of the behaviors that are related to a certain job performance.

On a comparison of the three methods, there are many similarities between Behavioral anchored rating scale (BARS), and graphical rating scale. These two methods make use of a rating scale on which assessors are required to assess a certain task or behavior that is relevant to job performance. The assessor then rates employees according to how they meet the rating criteria.

Employee comparison differs slightly from the other two methods. This method compares employee performance without tying it to a certain job dimension (Schermerhorn, 2012). In contrast, the graphical rating scale employs the use of numbers in rating task quality and adjectives to describe performance.

The BARS-specific behavior performance level is anchored by job dimension, and the process is more complex than graphical rating scale. Graphical rating scale and BARS can rate employee performance across different departments within the organization.

On the other hand, employee comparison method cannot be sufficiently used to rate all organization staff performance. For instance, an employee may be ranked high in one department, but when ranked in another department he or she might not be among the top five (Schermerhorn, 2012).

Performance evaluation biases and errors

Performance evaluation is plagued with a number of biases and errors. Major biases in the performance evaluations include political bias, gender bias, recent negative incidents, and relationships outside the workplace between employees and assessors (International Association of Fire Chiefs, 2010).

The common errors in performance evaluation are biases, lack of performance follow-ups, negative approaches, untruthful feedbacks, and excessive leniency and severity (International Association of Fire Chiefs, 2010).

Improving performance evaluation

In order to eliminate the biases and errors in performance and evaluation the organization need to use a number of techniques to improve the whole process. The organizations should consider using interactive technique whereby the assessors seek input about the evaluation from employees and managers.

Employees should be asked to provide their self-assessments, which are included in the final report by the assessors. The employee should also involve employees in the developing of the evaluation plan (Hale, 2007).

The second technique is the development and feedback technique whereby an organization makes performance reviews, conducts performance follow-up, and offers checklists to employees (Hale, 2007). The purpose of all these is to eliminate the errors that occur due to lack of follow-up and regular feedbacks.

Furthermore, one-sided technique can be used whereby, after the supervisor has finished writing an evaluation report, he discusses it with employees to help eliminate errors before submitting the report (Hale, 2007).

Conclusion

Performance evaluation is a very important subject for any organization that wants to maximize and change employee behavior at the workplace. Organizations should realize the importance of performance evaluation by embracing evaluation techniques that ensure the whole process is free from any biases and errors.

The organization shall reap the benefits that are associated with efficient and effective job performance by developing an interactive performance appraisal.

References

Armstrong, M. (2012).Armstrong’s handbook of human resource management practice. London: Kogan Page.

International Association of Fire Chiefs. (2010). Fire officer: Principles and practice. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.

Hale, J. A. (2007). The performance consultant’s fieldbook: Tools and techniques for improving organizations and people. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.

Robbins, S. P. (2009). Organisationalbehaviour: Global and Southern African perspectives. Cape Town: Pearson Education South Africa.

Schermerhorn, J. R. (2012). Exploring management. Hoboken, N.J: Wiley.

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