By Dave Clemens
Of all the tasks that HR hopes line managers will carry out effectively, performance reviews stand at or near the top of the list.
After all, proper evaluations form the core of so much of HR’s work. How can the organization properly promote, reward or – if need be – prune out the appropriate employees without a clear idea of how they’re doing?
And yet, supervisors make a number of serious mistakes when doing evaluations, according to a recent survey of almost 1,500 HR professionals at organizations ranging from under 250 to more than 10,000 employees.
If you have reason to believe that your line managers could be doing a better job with personnel evaluations, you might want to take a look at the most common of these mistakes:
1. Neglecting to follow up
What’s the use of doing a performance review if the manager doesn’t check back with the employee to see whether he or she is making progress in areas targeted by the review? Fully 40% of those surveyed said managers in their organizations regularly fail to do so.
2. Putting everyone in the same ‘satisfactory’ basket
Some 40% of survey respondents said their line managers try to avoid hurting people’s feelings or stirring jealousies among co-workers by rating everyone somewhere in the middle of whatever scale is being used. So instead of seeing a healthy sprinkling of “unsatisfactories” and “excellents,” you end up looking at a whole bunch of “satisfactories” when you examine the results of a manager’s evaluations of his or her department. This tells you exactly nothing.
3. Focusing only on most recent performance
Almost 39% of those surveyed said managers are swayed too much by what the employee has done for them recently. In other words, managers doing an annual evaluation fall prey to an employee or employees gaming the evaluation by slacking off for 10 months and then working really hard for a few weeks leading up to the performance review.
4. Omitting reasons for the rating
You’d think this would rarely happen. But 37% of respondents say their managers do it often enough that it’s a problem.
5. Failing to create an improvement plan
This is another follow-up mistake, one that 26% of the survey respondents said they see frequently.
6. Giving in to the ‘halo effect’
This occurs when a manager focuses primarily or exclusively on one or two areas that the employee does well, and lets this color an evaluation that should also cover an employee’s shortcomings. Some 19% of respondents said they see this regularly from managers.
Other errors
According to the survey, other significant errors that managers make when doing evaluations include failure to complete them (14%), over-focusing on an incident from the time the manager began supervising the employee (14%), basing ratings on how much the employee’s personality and/or interests match the managers’ (13%), and underrating the employee based on a single negative impression (12%).
Make no mistake, performance evaluations are hard. It’s worth your while to make sure that line managers have the help and feedback they need to do them right.
Dave Clemens is a senior writer for Rapid Learning Institute and writes The HR Café Blog. His work has appeared in The Associated Press, World Press Review, and in several human resources, employment law, and business newsletters.
For more on the survey, see http://bit.ly/1mSslXW