Gibsonia Gazette

Effective, Expectation Based Performance Reviews August 8, 2010

An employee is called to the office of their supervisor.  Once there they are told that their performance is not satisfactory.  The employee is then told that if they don’t show significant improvement by a specific date they could be terminated.

The employee leaves the office in a state of bewilderment since nobody ever told them that they had to meet certain expectations.  “Expectations!  What expectations?”  says the employee to nobody in particular.

Sound familiar?  This is a common situation for supervisors and employees.  How does a person do what is expected when no one has told them specifically what is expected.

What about the annual review?  For a manager, spending inordinate amounts of time at the end of the year trying to remember what kind of a job a person did over the previous 12 months is wasting time.  Invariably, the employee will remind you of the good things you forgot to write about; or they’ll go away resentful because of the things you forgot.  And, human nature is such that we’ll probably remember the negative things from the prior year more vividly than the positives. Not exactly the note on which you would like to begin the year.

Employees deserve two very important things from their manager / supervisor:

1. To know what is expected of them.
2. To be told, on a regular basis, how they are performing as measured against those expectations.

In my formative years as a sales manager, I had expectations that the sales people reporting to me knew what I thought they should be doing.  “They’re sales people, they should know,”  I thought.

What I learned is my sales staff really did not know what I expected of them beyond a monthly and annual dollar goal.  The expectations of how they were to achieve those goals were never communicated. If they made ‘X’ number of weekly calls, they believed they had done what they needed to do.  They didn’t know the steps I expected them to take to achieve those goals.   Why didn’t they know?  I had not told them; shame on me for not clearly defining and communicating expectations.

You can’t hold a person accountable if you don’t tell them what they are accountable for.  They deserve to know how they will be measured.  They must know what you expect of them.  And you need to know what expectations they have of themselves.

Which brings us back to performance reviews.  Here is how I would suggest you can make your expectation reviews more effective:

Start in December by setting the expectations for each employee for the following year.  List your expectations and have them list expectations for themselves.  Agree to a mutually defined set of expectations (remember, as the employer / supervisor, you have the final say) and set benchmarks by which they will be measured.  Ask the employee to contribute ideas to help you set these expectations.  When they have input, the employee will embrace the goals as their own.

At least once every quarter, or more often if you wish, meet for an informal review of the expectations to see how the employee is doing.  At this time you can set additional expectations and determine what is necessary to move forward on those that are not being met in a timely manner.

The employee and the supervisor now have a clear idea of expectations and how they will be measured.  They are having regular, scheduled, non-confrontational conversations specific to those expectations.  And, the year-end review becomes a compilation of the prior conversations for you, which creates an opportunity to set new expectations.

No more spending hours trying to remember employee performance over the past year.  Now, the entire process should take no more than 3 – 4 hours over the course of the entire year.   And the results should maximize employee performance.

This blog is edited by Noelle Hoguet-Singer