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EVALUATE YOUR PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT PROCESS

How do you know if your performance management process is working? Recall that the primary reasons for doing performance management are to enable the right things to get done well through the efforts of your people and to develop people in the process. Following are suggestions for finding out how well your process is doing these things.

The Basic Questions

  1. Do you have measurable goals that reflect your agency's mission and strategy?
  2. Can all employees in your agency explain what the agency's mission and strategic goals are?
  3. Do all employees have measurable goals that align with your agency's mission and strategy?
  4. Do all employees know how they are doing compared to their goals?
  5. Do managers in your agency have the information that they need to accurately evaluate their employees' performance?
  6. Is there a relationship between year-to-year changes in base pay and individual performance in your agency?
  7. Is the distribution of employee performance ratings in your agency reflected in how well the agency is carrying out its mission?

Metrics

The above questions are really "thought" questions that require a bit more specification before you can use them as the basis for collecting data. Below are some proposed metrics that define actual ways to define and collect the data needed to answer the questions.

Compliance Measures

The following suggested measures are relatively easy to collect. They deal primarily with processes and task completion. They help to determine if the policies and procedures relating to performance management that have been put in place are actually being followed.

  1. Percent of employees employed for more than one year who have a work plan.
  2. Percent of employees employed for more than two years who have a performance appraisal on file.
  3. Percent of supervisor's time engaged in administrative aspects of performance management (filling out forms, documenting performance problems, etc.).
  4. Percent of supervisor's time spent actually managing performance (setting priorities, discussing progress with employees, dealing with performance problems, etc.).
  5. Percent of performance appraisals completed on time.
  6. Percent of employees who say that their supervisors have had an appraisal discussion with them.
  7. Percent of employees who have work plans in place within the first ten days of the new performance cycle.
  8. Percent of employees new to their positions whose supervisors have reviewed performance expectations with them and who have a work plan in place within the first ten days on the job.
  9. Percent of employees who have an active development plan.
  10. Percent of employees rated at the "exceeds expectations" level.

Despite their focus on process rather than results, some of these measures may be helpful in detecting problems and in reinforcing the right behaviors. For example, measure # 8 looks at how soon after coming on board new employees have performance expectations reviewed with them by their supervisors. If the data collected for this measure indicate new employees are waiting a long time before expectations get set, agency leaders should be impelled to ask supervisors to be more diligent in properly onboarding new employees.

Agency leaders may also use this measure to reset expectations by, for example, tightening up the target for the measure. Rather than expecting 85% of new employees to have performance expectations reviewed with them within the first 30 days, for example, the target could be tightened to ten days.

This illustrates how a good metric can serve both as a way to track what is happening (how soon after hire are expectations reviewed with new hires) and as a method for initiating positive changes in existing practices (getting supervisors to review expectations with new hires in the first week rather than after they have been on the job for a month).

Impact Measures

In contrast to the compliance measures, impact measures look at results and outcomes. So, instead of determining if appraisal discussions are conducted on time or if the distribution of ratings fits a theoretical bell curve, you ask if top-rated employees stay around longer, get promoted more often, and receive greater increases in base pay than less effective performers. These measures are often more difficult to collect and individual managers and supervisors tend to have less ability to directly affect them. However, these are the "ultimate" measures, the things that performance management is really trying to affect, the outcomes your agency ought to be most concerned about.

The impact measures consist of soft measures (what people say, usually gathered through surveys) and hard measures (what people do, usually collected by systems that track transactions).

Soft Measures of Impact

  1. Percent of employees who say they know what is expected of them in their jobs.
  2. Percent of employees who know how well they are meeting expectations at all times during the year.
  3. Percent of employees who say their supervisors have been helpful in dealing with barriers and obstacles to getting their jobs done.
  4. Percent of supervisors who say they have enough of the right kind of information to determine how well their employees are performing at all times during the year.
  5. Percent of employees who say that performance problems in their work unit are dealt with quickly.
  6. Percent of supervisors who believe they are able to accurately evaluate their employees' performance in their annual appraisals.
  7. Percent of employees who say the appraisal discussion conducted by their supervisor was constructive and helpful to them.
  8. Percent of employees who perceive a positive relationship between performance and pay.
  9. Percent of employees who perceive an increase in productivity in their workplaces.
  10. Percent of employees who report that their supervisors have helped them be successful in meeting their performance expectations.
  11. Percent of supervisors who qualify as "Masters of Performance Management" as determined by their scores on an employee survey.

Hard Impact Measures

  1. Number of times during the past month that supervisors talked with their employees about how things were going relative to the employees' performance expectations.
  2. Percent of employees who can accurately describe what the agency's mission and strategic goals are.
  3. Percent of employees who can explain how the work they do contributes to the agency's ability to fulfill its mission.
  4. Percent of highly rated employees who voluntarily quit.
  5. Percent differential in average annual pay increases between employees who "exceed expectations" and those who "meet expectations."
  6. Correlation between employees' performance ratings and the percent increases in base salary they received during the same year (not counting employees who change positions during the year).
  7. Percent of employees who are appraised below the "meets expectations" level who either improved their performance or have left the agency by the following year.
  8. Correlation between employee performance and agency performance.