Review your evaluation system
It’s probably garbage; try regular feedback instead
One of the big breaks of my career was being hired as the chief operating officer of a small organization. The board of directors recruited me after recognizing the CEO was one of those industry visionary types more suited to being the face of the organization than running day-to-day operations.
Those day-to-day operations included evaluating employees, and the board asked me to implement a formal performance review system. The organization I had just left had a system that was pretty typical: Once a year, employees were given a score of one to five (five being the best) in various categories.
I remember the first year I evaluated my staff using this system. Our division’s receptionist had done an exceptional job, so I gave her a five for customer service. My boss said, “No one gets a five.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because if you give them a five, they’ll stop trying.”
The trick, I learned, was to keep employees’ egos from collapsing (don’t give them a one or two) while also not letting them think they could be valuable to another employer (no fives).
Keep them right in the sweet spot: 3.25 to 3.75. In my first year, I thought the system was stupid. By my fourth year, it was a way of life.
And at my new employer, I went with what I knew. But when I showed the system to the CEO, he said: “That’s stupid. Why would you do that to people? If they’re doing a good job, tell ’em. If they’re not, tell ’em.”
I came to the conclusion that he was right: This type of performance evaluation was stupid. I couldn’t remember a single employee improving his or her performance based on feedback given through this mechanism. The entire performance evaluation process always had a confrontational tone to it. And as a supervisor, I disliked it almost as much as my employees did.
I never knew how to determine the difference between a 3.5 and a 3.75. The entire exercise was dehumanizing, and as far as I could tell had no relationship whatsoever to improving performance. If that’s the case, why did we continue to do it? Out of habit, that’s why. It was difficult to think of something better.
Rather than use that system, I implemented a more informal, regular system of feedback based on actual conversations between two people, rather than arbitrary numbers. It wasn’t anything revolutionary, but it was a more human way to give employees a sense of how they were doing.
And, by the way, it worked really well.