“It is harder to unlearn than learn.”
--- John Barber, The Book of 1000 Proverbs
When you’re in business, about the only thing that matters to your customers and clients is performance. And most businesses cannot afford amateurish performance these days.
If you’ve spent time, money and energy on training your employees, and they are still poor performers, it may be time to consider using an employee-performance assessment tool. An employee-performance assessment program can help you determine what additional training, if any, may be useful or appropriate. But, it can also do much more.
Example: A Team of Accountants
In some cases, employees may fail to respond to coaching or training, and there can be other factors to consider. For instance, a team of accountants may be performing at a 100 percent accuracy rate. And in tackling their monthly reporting activities, they are meeting all their deadlines. Then management decides to add on extra duties outside their job descriptions such as responding to and handling customer-service inquiries.
In cases like this, there can be unintended consequences. For one, the performance levels of these employees may decline, which in turn negatively impacts the company’s performance. This decline or a drop in employee performance levels can happen for a number of reasons, and it’s unlikely that additional training or coaching will offset them. In the example above, the real influencers could be something like the following:
- The extra duties are perceived by the employees as “completely out of the picture.”
- The changes are rejected, and the team finds the added duties as unacceptable.
- These employees are comfortable working with their computers and numbers, but they are uncomfortable being in daily contact with people.
Help Them Help You: The Employee-Performance Assessment Ties It Altogether
When an organization implements employee-performance assessments—again using the example of the accountants—handling customer-service inquiries is documented as being 10 percent of their jobs. Furthermore, they understand that they will be rated on this added responsibility, and they will be given feedback from the customers. In other words, everything is tied together.
All totaled, the organization will have an infrastructure in place to support the change(s). Also, it is important to include communications steps: Managers should communicate with the employees that times have changed and their job duties have correspondingly changed. Some employees may have a difficult time adjusting to the changes, and they may choose to move on. Yet others, because the expectations are clear and their behaviors are tied to results, will accept the changes and successfully adapt.
If managed correctly, this program helps employees know what is expected of them, what the standards are and how they are evaluated. Most employees perform better under these circumstances.
The key to successfully develop and implement this program is to make sure it is the right tool for your organization. Therefore, in my next Insight, I will review some common mistakes employers make when initiating or managing employee performance assessment programs.