7. if you were a Human Resource director, how would you coach a new manager to c

Question

7. if you were a Human Resource director, how would you coach a new manager to complete performance assessments with their employees? How would it be different if you were coaching an employee on preparing for their review?

8. Describe and give five examples of bias in the evaluation process.

9. Outline the steps that are taken during the actual performance review.

10. What are some steps that can be taken if there are difficult areas of the review which need to be covered or if an employee doesn't agree with the review?

Explanation / Answer

if you were a Human Resource director, how would you coach a new manager to complete performance assessments with their employees? How would it be different if you were coaching an employee on preparing for their review?

Conduct self-assessments to get your employees' perspective

A fairly simple practice to implement at an individual or organizational level is employee self-assessment. You can either use the same form you do for your regular performance appraisal, or create a slightly modified version. The purpose of the self-assessment is to get your employee's perspective on their performance. This is a powerful way to give them a voice in the process and help them feel more engaged. Managers unfamiliar with the practice often worry that employees will give themselves glowing reviews and ratings, making the performance appraisal meeting more difficult; however, experience shows the opposite tends to be true. When we evaluate ourselves, we tend to be much harsher than others. Getting your employee's perspective is an invaluable way to get more information on their performance and to prepare yourself for the performance appraisal meeting. It allows you to be ready to address differences in opinion or perspective, and gain insight into expectations.

Seek the opinion and experience of others with 360 degree reviews

One way to make your employee's performance appraisal broader and more objective is to solicit feedback from others. Multirater feedback can help managers avoid bias, get a different perspective on their employee's performance and better identify areas that need coaching or development. You should consider collecting feedback from other managers, peers, subordinates, even customers — anyone who works with the employee on a regular basis and can give you insight into their performance. While it's often used in the context of leadership development, managers often fail to take advantage of this powerful tool for their performance management process. It can be especially vital when some conflict or tension exists between the manager and employee, when different personality types make the feedback process difficult, or when managers don't always work directly with their employees (shift work, project work, etc.). Substantiating feedback by gathering it from multiple, credible sources can make it more objective and increase its impact.

Give goals a larger context by aligning them with the organization's goals

While it's important to assign your employee goals as part of the performance management process, it's even more powerful to give these goals a larger context. This helps your employee understand why their work is important and how it contributes to the larger organization's success. While traditionally, managers have tried to accomplish this by linking employee goals to their own, a much more powerful practice is to align or link them to higher-level departmental, divisional, or organizational goals. Research on employee engagement has shown that this context setting is vital to employee performance. It helps them feel that their work matters.

There's a famous story about a visitor to NASA headquarters who came across a janitor sweeping the floor. When he asked the janitor what he was doing, the janitor replied: "I'm helping to put a man on the moon." It's this kind of goal alignment that helps drive up employee performance.

Help your employees improve and succeed with development plans

Companies often do development planning separately from their performance management process, if they do it at all. But development planning is much more powerful when it's an integral part of the performance management process. The performance appraisal meeting is typically the prime time when managers and employees discuss performance deficiencies. Identifying training activities to address these deficiencies during the appraisal meeting, and documenting it in the performance appraisal form helps to communicate both the manager's and the organization's commitment to the employee, and their expectations for improvement. It also gives the employee a clear context for their learning. The performance appraisal meeting is also a wonderful opportunity to discuss the employee's career aspirations, both short and long term, and explore opportunities to prepare the employee for advancement within the organization. Feeling that they have a career path or future with an organization is another key contributor to employee engagement.

Implement pay for performance to reward good performance

One final practice that helps expand the value and impact of your performance management process is pay-for-performance. Performance ratings should be a known and visible factor in determining employee rewards and compensation. Integrating your performance management process with your compensation management helps employees feel that compensation practices are fair and empowers them. This practice applies to more than just merit increases and bonuses; any form of employee reward or recognition should be integrated with your performance management process and serve to reinforce desired behavior and performance.

Taking performance management to the next level

Performance management should be much more than a process for documenting and delivering feedback and coaching. When expanded beyond the basics, it becomes a powerful tool for helping your employees develop further and achieve their full potential. In so doing, they increase their value to the organization and help drive organization success.

There are many types of coaching elements that provide a framework of the coaching process. The following are examples of elements from the Idaho Division of Human Resources that are essential when it comes to performance coaching:

Building Trust - Trust is key to coaching. The supervisor and employee relationship must have some level of trust for coaching to work. A mutual interest in the success of the other is critical. Trust can begin to develop through open, honest feedback and respect.

Defining the Issues - The supervisor/manager should seek information from the employee to better understand the issue or performance in question. The emphasis is not on proving who is right or wrong, but on gathering information in a non-judgmental manner.

Coaching for Success - Taking employees from compliance to commitment can be difficult. Finding or creating that factor means sometimes helping the employee get in touch with what matters to him/her - what are his/her internal goals. Sometimes this is best achieved through the use of open-ended questions leading to the employee's self discovery.

Creating a Plan of Action - For the purpose of buy-in and commitment, the supervisor and the employee should jointly create an action plan. The plan should include performance goals that are simple, measurable and attainable.

Feedback

Feedback is the primary tool used to provide employees with information and guidance. Feedback consists of two-way communication.

Employee feedback provides managers with clues regarding how they are hindering or aiding their subordinates' work performance.

Supervisory feedback should inform, enlighten, and suggest improvements to employees regarding their performance. Supervisors should describe specific results they have observed as close to the event as possible so ideas stay fresh and any needed adjustments can be made in a timely manner. Successful supervisors develop a routine that includes frequent, in-depth discussions about performance with employees. The routine should remain informal and the discussions should focus on how both the employee and supervisor view the employee's performance and development.

The following are three main points about feedback from the November 2006 HR Magazine article, Feedback, Not Appraisal, by Christopher D. Lee, as they relate to performance management:

Share - When managers share enough accurate information with employees about the quality and quantity of their work, employees are more likely to fully understand what is needed to continue good performance, correct poor performance or improve mediocre performance.

Seek - Supervisors who actively solicit feedback from their subordinates discover obstacles to their success and are able to remove them in a timely fashion.

Continue - Periodic feedback sessions give the manager and employee multiple opportunities to calibrate and recalibrate their joint efforts. Continuous feedback is required for increased productivity and successful partnerships.

Build a Relationship of Mutual Trust
The foundation of any coaching relationship is rooted in the manager's day-to-day relationship with the employee. Without some degree of trust, conducting an effective coaching meeting is impossible.

Open the Meeting
In opening a coaching meeting, it's important for the manager to clarify, in a nonevaluative, nonaccusatory way, the specific reason the meeting was arranged. The key to this step is to restate -- in a friendly, nonjudgmental manner -- the meeting purpose that was first set when the appointment was scheduled.

Get Agreement
Probably the most critical step in the coaching meeting process is getting the employee to agree verbally that a performance issue exists. Overlooking or avoiding the performance issue because you assume the employee understands its significance is a typical mistake of managers. To persuade an employee a performance issue exists, a manager must be able to define the nature of the issue and get the employee to recognize the consequences of not changing his or her behavior. To do this, you must specify the behavior and clarify the consequences.

Explore Alternatives
Next, explore ways the issue can be improved or corrected by encouraging the employee to identify alternative solutions. Avoid jumping in with your own alternatives, unless the employee is unable to think of any. Push for specific alternatives and not generalizations. Your goal in this step is not to choose an alternative, which is the next step, but to maximize the number of choices for the employee to consider and to discuss their advantages and disadvantages.

This requires the skill of reacting and expanding. You should acknowledge the employee's suggestion, discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the suggestion, ask for and offer additional suggestions, and ask the employee to explain how to resolve the issue under discussion.

Get a Commitment to Act
The next step is to help the employee choose an alternative. Don't make the choice for the employee. To accomplish this step, the manager must be sure to get a verbal commitment from the employee regarding what action will be taken and when it will be taken. Be sure to support the employee's choice and offer praise.

Handle Excuses
Employee excuses may occur at any point during the coaching meeting. To handle excuses, rephrase the point by taking a comment or statement that was perceived by the employee to be blaming or accusatory and recast it as an encouragement for the employee to examine his or her behavior. Respond empathically to show support for the employee's situation and communicate an understanding of both the content and feeling of the employee's comment.

Provide Feedback
Effective coaches understand the value and importance of giving continual performance feedback to their people, both positive and corrective.

There are a few critical things to remember when giving feedback to others. Feedback should:

Be timely. It should occur as soon as practical after the interaction, completion of the deliverable, or observation is made.

Be specific. Statements like "You did a great job" or "You didn't take care of the clients' concerns very well" are too vague and don't give enough insight into the behavior you would like to see repeated or changed.

Focus on the "what," not the "why." Avoid making the feedback seem as if it is a judgment. Begin with "I have observed..." or "I have seen..." and then refer to the behavior. Focus on behavior and not the person. Describe what you heard and saw and how those behaviors impact the team, client, etc.

Use a sincere tone of voice. Avoid a tone that exhibits anger, frustration, disappointment or sarcasm.

Positive feedback strengthens performance. People will naturally go the extra mile when they feel recognized and appreciated. When corrective feedback is handled poorly, it will be a significant source of friction and conflict. When it is handled well, people will experience the positive effects and performance is strengthened.

Describe and give five examples of bias in the evaluation process.

Bias can influence employee performance reviews in incredibly negative ways. A good manager should be objective about the performance of their employees and performance review bias distorts a manager and company’s view of how an employee is performing. In order to maintain an efficient workplace it is imperative that managers avoid any and all bias in employee performance reviews.

Central Tendency Bias

This bias consists of a manager grouping most of his employees into middle level grades while having some extremes in the top and bottom. This bias negatively affects performance reviews by not addressing all of the contributions and problems of employees. This bias should be avoided for efficient growth in the workplace.

Personal Biases

This is among the most common problems with the veracity of employee reviews. Personal biases often prevent an objective analysis of the employee. This bias also goes both ways- people the manager personally likes will benefit and people he personally dislikes will be punished. This is one of the most detrimental forms of review bias for a number of reasons. If an employee believes they are being singled out they may have legal recourse against their employer. This bias also damages the company’s ability to fire and hire effective workers. If personal relationships drive areas like hiring, firing, promotions, transfers and other work related issues the company may not function properly or be profitable. Most companies strive to build teams that are free from personal biases. An effective performance review will do so as well.

The Halo Effect

The halo effect is roughly defined as when a manager values a certain positive quality of an employee to the detriment of objectivity during a performance review. The manager in question may ignore other problems with an employee because he is stellar in one area. However this keeps the employees from knowing about faults in other areas, which keeps them from growing, as well as diminishing their value to the company.

Spillover Effect Bias

This bias pertains to a manager judging the current performance of an employee by using past performance as a reference point. If a manager is not viewing the performance of an employee clearly due to the spillover effect many problems can arise. This employee’s recent performance reviews will likely not be accurate. The employee and his supervisor will also have an unfairly weighted version of this employee’s performance which will cause other problems in the workplace.

Recency Bias

The recency bias is one of the trickier forms of bias that may interfere with an effective performance review. When managers are affected by this bias they tend to over or under value short term events to the detriment of the employee’s long term performance. Most performance reviews are set period of times, so failing to take into account the entire performance review time period can lead to ineffective and false performance reviews

Opportunity bias

Opportunity bias transpires when the manager either credits or faults the employee for factors beyond the employee’s control. Managers stricken with the opportunity bias praise or blame the employee when the true cause of the performance was opportunity or a lack thereof. An example of this bias is a manager rating a sales employee favorably overall due to one big sale obtained by a stroke of luck, rather than through normal sales channels such as meeting cold-calling and prospecting goals.

Horns Effect

The Horns Effect occurs when an employee has one hindering weakness, and the manager allows this to seep into other rating categories or the overall outcome of the employee’s performance appraisal. For example, if an employee is especially weak in the category of “customer satisfaction,” it is not necessarily true that the employee may need to make improvement in the categories of “job knowledge” or “problem solving.”

Similar-to-me bias

This bias occurs when the manager gives higher ratings to employees who are similar to the rater. We tend to like and relate well to people who remind us of ourselves; however, this resemblance should not spill over into performance review ratings.

Length-of-service bias

It is important to remember that length of service is not a factor in evaluating performance. Therefore, long-term employees should be evaluated according to the same established standards as other employees.

It’s a great idea to assess your own biases prior to completing performance evaluations. It is also important to review these common biases with your management team prior to the commencement of performance appraisals, so your performance reviews are more accurate and objective in nature. When you are able to remove some of the bias from the evaluation process, performance appraisals become much more meaningful for organizational decision-making and compensation adjustments. In addition, they become much more useful to the employee in assessing valid areas that need improvement.

Examples:

Outline the steps that are taken during the actual performance review.

Establish standards to measure performance.Within an organization's overall strategic plan, managers define goals for organizational departments in specific, operational terms that include standards of performance to compare with organizational activities.

Measure actual performance. Most organizations prepare formal reports of performance measurements that managers review regularly. These measurements should be related to the standards set in the first step of the control process. For example, if sales growth is a target, the organization should have a means of gathering and reporting sales data.

Compare performance with the standards. This step compares actual activities to performance standards. When managers read computer reports or walk through their plants, they identify whether actual performance meets, exceeds, or falls short of standards. Typically, performance reports simplify such comparison by placing the performance standards for the reporting period alongside the actual performance for the same period and by computing the variance—that is, the difference between each actual amount and the associated standard.

Take corrective actions. When performance deviates from standards, managers must determine what changes, if any, are necessary and how to apply them. In the productivity and qualitycentered environment, workers and managers are often empowered to evaluate their own work. After the evaluator determines the cause or causes of deviation, he or she can take the fourth step—corrective action. The most effective course may be prescribed by policies or may be best left up to employees' judgment and initiative.

Establishing high standards of performance: The process of appraisal starts when the standards of performance has been established. The senior managers have to determine what kind outputs, accomplishments and skills need to evaluated. All of these standards must be evolved out of job descriptions and analysis. The standard of performance should always be concise and clear so that the objective can be measured and understood accordingly. The standards must not ever be expressed in a manner that is vague or clear enough. Don’t use words such as good job which explain nothing about the appraisal at all.

Communicating expectations towards all employees: Once the standards of performance have been built, you must remember to communicate the matter accordingly to all employees so that they may know what is expected out of them. The old experiences also show that not being able to communicate towards the employees so that they know what must be expected. Apart from that, it has also been stated that the standards of communication towards all employees will compound the problem of appraisal. However it must be noted that transferring information from your manager towards the employees is not exactly communication. It could become communication only when transferring information has taken place and has been understood by all employees.

Measuring the real performance: The third step that must be taken during the process of appraisal is measuring of the actual performance. During this stage, the real performance of all employees is measured on the sort of information that is available from different kinds of resources for example oral reports, written reports and even statistical reports. Personal observation also matters in matters like these. The feeling of the evaluator shall never influence the measurement of performance of the employees. Measurements have to be based on objectives, findings and facts stated. The reason behind this is that what we will measure becomes more important to the process of evaluation than how we are measuring it.

Comparing performance with the standards: During this stage, the real performance is always compared with standards that are predetermined. Such comparisons could reveal deviations between actual and standard performance and will also allow the evaluator that will proceed to the other steps of the entire process. In short, having a proper and detailed discussion with those who are concerned in the matter!

Discussing with all employees: Next what you must do in the process of appraisal is communicate and discuss what the results of the appraisal are with the employees concerned. This happens to be quite a difficult and challenging task to accomplish for the manager who is expected to present an appraisal that is accurate for all employees and make them understand and accept their appraisal in a realistic manner. When you discuss matters like these with them, you are able to understand and assess their strengths and weaknesses in a much better way. It will also help them perform better in the near future. The impact could be either negative or positive depending on how it has been shown to the employees and discussed with them.

Corrective actions: The final and most important step in the process of appraisal is initiating the corrective action whenever it is needed. The areas which need any improvement must be identified and then the measures have to be improved and corrected so that the performance improves with time and has been identified at the same time. Corrective action again could be divided in two. The first one deals with symptoms mostly. It is called putting out fires. The second one is about what causes such deviations and looks for adjustment of differences

What are some steps that can be taken if there are difficult areas of the review which need to be covered or if an employee doesn't agree with the review?

Many of us find giving and receiving feedback challenging. This is especially so when we need to give or receive feedback about work, behaviour or actions that are not consistent with what we expect.

Whilst difficult performance discussions can take place during formal cyclical performance reviews, feedback on issues of concern should not be delayed until then. They should be discussed between employees and managers promptly after they occur. Ideally there should not be any surprises presented by employees or managers at cyclical performance reviews.

The checklists below provide guidance for employees and supervisors/managers approaching a difficult performance discussion or preparing to give feedback to a staff member, manager or colleague.

Analyse the situation

Identify your objectives for the discussion

Plan the discussion

Consider:

Make an agenda or plan to help you stay focussed during the discussion:

Choose the words you will use carefully:

Plan how you will ensure it is a two-way discussion by:

Be prepared to change your mind if new information comes to light.

Acknowledge that it is okay to be nervous:

Seek assistance and support

Discuss your approach with a mentor, trusted adviser, the HR team or the Employee Assistance Program.

Begin with an end in mind.

Always know the solution that you seek before starting. Do you want some aspect of the written performance document changed before you sign it? Do you simply want to be heard?

Schedule a follow-up discussion.

Tell your boss some of the information comes as a surprise (if that's true) and that you need time to think about what he's said. Ask for a copy of your performance evaluation so that you can better process the information.

Know what aspect of the review you disagree with.

Most organizations' performance systems involve not only an overall rating (e.g., a "2" on a 5-point scale) but also sub-ratings (e.g., communication skills, initiative). Often, there are also supporting comments. Managers who are overly blunt in their written comments can easily offend employees without meaning to.

If you seek changes to your performance document, know that managers often have more flexibility in adjusting their comments and sub-ratings without discussing it with HR or their boss. However, changes in overall ratings are often another story. Your argument better be awful convincing if that's what you're after

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