How To Manage Employee Performance West Lafayette IN

Employee performance is key to business success. When you hire an employee to fill any given job, you choose the candidate who offers the best potential to succeed. Just as you maintain your capital equipment to keep it running in top condition, your staff's success is another component of your capital investment that requires maintenance.

The best way to put that plan into action is by doing performance appraisals. They provide the necessary feedback and coaching to help employees be motivated, do better, and accomplish more toward making your company thrive. Before you can even think about assessing an individual employee's performance, several key components should be in place:

1. Define the nuts and bolts. The best way to accomplish this is by providing a written job description or position profile to each employee.
2. Communicate expectations for job performance to employees. Be sure to include any defined company or customer standards.
3. Understand each employee's qualifications and ability to ensure your expectations are realistic.
4. Review and understand any legal or regulatory requirements.
5. As an evaluator, observe employees' work execution and performance against established criteria frequently. Consider maintaining a critical incident log to track significant events and behavior.
6. Provide continual feedback to employees as appropriate to any given situation. It is much better to deal with a problem when it happens than to let it become a more serious concern. When delivering feedback, both negative and positive, use specific examples to support your comments.

The Appraisal

About 75 percent of North American companies conduct regular reviews of an employee's performance. Such appraisals work best as a reinforcement of—but never a substitute for—ongoing efforts to manage staff performance. Helping your team grow is not a once-a-year task.

By going one step further and formalizing your regular initiatives into a formal review, you will:

• Find out in more depth how people are doing at their jobs
• Reinforce feedback to employees about how they are doing
• Motivate staff
• Create or revise relevant job and personal objectives
• Encourage employee feedback
• Strengthen the relationship between managers or supervisors and their direct reports
• Determine training needs
• Evaluate employees for promotion
• Review employee compliance with government health, safety, and environmental regulations
• Identify areas that need improvement and what needs to be done, along with concrete goals.

There are many methods for conducting performance appraisals. Try the more structured approach of arranging a one-on-one meeting for each employee for the best results. Here are some guidelines:

• For each meeting, chose a place and schedule that are most conducive to constructive dialogue. Allow time for meaningful discussion.
• Keep a positive spin on the exercise. Do everything possible to reinforce the two overall aims of providing motivational feedback and finding ways to help both the employee and company achieve their goals.
• Use the opportunity to raise staff morale. Since job security is a concern for most employees, this is a good time to reaffirm their strengths and tell them how much you value their contributions to your business.
• You must also let them know when they are not performing to acceptable standards. Relaying criticism constructively is essential to an open, trusting communication dynamic.
• Avoid surprises. Significant events or behaviors, especially negative ones, should have been discussed with the employee beforehand.

Arnold Kahn is president of PrintLink, a leading professional placement firm specializing in the graphic communications industry.