NOT everyone in your team will perform at the same level. Some will slack for a while but will use that time to improve themselves. Others will perform well at the start but will eventually fade into the background. And then there are those who are just coasting. When year-end incentives depend on how people performed during the year and work requirements are continually evolving, how do you evaluate your team’s performance?
The first thing you need to have is your team’s Individual Performance Scorecard (IPS) which lists what you need to accomplish for the year. Your team’s IPS should indicate what they need to do, their targets, and the bases for identifying if they have achieved their targets. It is important that you set this before or at the beginning of the year so they know how they will be evaluated.
It is ideal to have a mid-year performance evaluation to serve as a checkpoint to calibrate your team’s deliverables against expected outcomes. This is also the time to address any issues they have in performing their tasks and any other factors that are hindering them from effectively doing their job. You can also use this time to get to know your team members and understand their motivations and personal goals. This will help you later in identifying appropriate intervention methods when you need to push and motivate them, or when they need to be disciplined.
During the annual performance evaluation, ask them to do their self-evaluation before sitting down to discuss their performance. Whenever applicable, ask them to provide documented justifications for their self-evaluation to prevent the evaluation from being too subjective. This provides them the opportunity to highlight what they have done well for the year. Take note of these achievements as these could indicate what they enjoyed doing and the important lessons they have learned.
Give them the time to evaluate themselves and while waiting, write down your own evaluations and notes. This might also be a good time to assess whether the performance indicators are appropriate for what they have accomplished throughout the year. It would be easier for you to evaluate your team if you have a tracker of the milestones for the year and individual contributions to the projects. An activity tracker will also help you in your own self-evaluation because the individual accomplishments of your team are also your own. This will benefit you in your own self-evaluation.
When you evaluate, you also need to consider those items which are not in the scorecard but are instrumental to the team’s function. These include stretch assignments or special projects that may not have been part of their job description or even your own expectations, but they did them anyway. Assign additional points for these projects because they went beyond what was expected of them. These should still feed into their overall evaluation especially if these took significant time and effort to accomplish.
When you do the evaluation, find a comfortable and private place where you and your team member can talk freely without being overheard. Create a comfortable and welcoming environment so they are free to discuss their accomplishments. Allow them to highlight what they think are their greatest achievements, but also ask what they think are the top three things they can improve. This will help you in providing guidance and direction, and provide the needed support in the form of a professional development plan which should be incorporated in their IPS. The goal of the meeting is to agree on their evaluation and the needed interventions necessary for them to achieve, or even exceed expectations.
The next step is to agree on what the actual evaluation will be per measure. In theory, this is agreed on by both the rater and the ratee but in reality, the rater almost always prevails because they have an overview of how the entire team operates and a standard by which to measure everyone in the team. If you have not done so, explain how you arrived at your rating by providing documented proof. Be careful also—because there are also cases when the ratee assesses themselves too low, probably because they have a low opinion of themselves, or they lack confidence in their accomplishments. This is a good opportunity to boost their morale by explaining how you arrived at your evaluation and then rating them as they deserve.
After you have evaluated them, set new targets based on how they performed throughout the year. To reduce subjectivity, always refer to the agreed scorecard and carefully evaluate how additional projects will be used in the evaluation. Agree on what needs to be done the following year and depending on the baselines and how they fared in the previous year, set realistic and achievable goals. This tells your team that they are important, and you are there to help them improve.
If needed, put people under a performance improvement plan if they consistently fall below expectations. You are doing a disservice not just to the team member involved, but to the entire team if you do not help them improve. Putting a team member under a performance improvement plan sends a message to your team that you will do everything you can to help them, but it is up to them if they want to improve. And if they do not shape up, then you have to let them go.
Thomas Reid once said that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The same goes for a team. And as a people manager, it is your role to ensure that everyone is in their most optimal condition. You can only do that if you monitor them consistently and appraise their performance as objectively as you can. When the entire team understands what they need to do, it becomes easier to direct them to where they are supposed to be. n
Image credits: Annie Spratt on Unsplash