Teams Blog

I once shocked a manager by telling her I thought she had rated me too highly in an annual performance review. I don’t recall the details anymore, just the stunned look on her face. Some mistake I had made during the year, though I had identified and corrected it at the time, made me feel that my colleagues had done a better job on one measure. Almost everybody got a 3 on almost everything, so a 3 seemed unfair. When I self-rated, I gave myself a 2. I ended up with a 3 anyway.

My apologies if this comes across as self-aggrandizing, but it illustrates a point: The most common complaints I have heard over the years about appraisals boil down to, “It’s not fair!” Many teamwork scientists and management gurus agree. John Hunter of Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog reports J. Edwards Deming “emphasized that forced rankings and other merit ratings that breed internal competition are bad management because they undermine motivation and breed contempt for management among people who, at least at first, were doing good work.” I’ve said for years that performance appraisals are legal protection for bad managers, a waste of time for the majority. If you set measurable standards for your employees, communicate monthly on the results, and praise and correct at every opportunity, an annual review tells the employee nothing new. If you don’t do those things, the review refocuses their effort way too late—perhaps 12 months too late. Though I offer recommendations in The SuddenTeams™ Program for harnessing appraisals to support team performance, that’s because appraisals are so prevalent, not because I like them.

Words like “fair” always cover a litany of traits, so I was intrigued when I came across a journal article defining the term, in effect. Two business professors, Richard Posthuma of the Univ. of Texas at El Paso and Michael Campion of Purdue Univ. started with a list of 1,000 possible sources and whittled it down to find 18 articles in peer-reviewed journals. From those they compiled a list of 20 best practices for performance reviews (PRs) that employees will consider fair. See the study summary for the complete list, but let’s discuss the ones most directly related to teams.

To ensure the team is focusing its efforts on the priorities of your company (or “nonprofit” or “agency”), I recommend having measurable standards that follow directly from measurable company goals. Some should be individual goals, and each team member should also have the team goals on his or her appraisal. Three of the best practices Posthuma and Campion found relate:

• “The PR should be based on observable job behaviors to the extent possible.”
• “Objective performance data should be considered to the extent possible.”
• “The PR should be aligned with organizational goals and objectives.”

They note in relation to another practice that at the start of the period covered by a review, “employees should have a good idea of what will be expected of them.” As an example of all of these, say a nonprofit helping ex-criminals break the crime cycle has a goal for the year to “Increase case closings by 20%.” The job placement team thus might create a goal of “Increase client placements by 20%,” and it follows that a placement counselor could have, “Place 20% more of my clients.”

You can make your whole HR process more efficient by having every employee draft their own job descriptions and negotiate them into final form with their supervisors. The method also lets you identify gaps between what managers expect and what people think the managers expect. Then use those descriptions as the basis for job ads, interviews, hiring decisions, reviews, and performance improvement plans if needed (to try to correct poor performance before firing someone). This alignment also reduces your odds of legal liability, according to employment law and HR experts. Posthuma and Campion list:

• “The content of the PR should be based on a job analysis or shown to be job related.”
• “Subject matter experts should have input on the factors to be evaluated in the PR.” They add that the best SMEs are people who are doing or have done the jobs.

I am, as regular readers know, a big advocate of employee empowerment. It is the most powerful method of improving a host of measures related to cost-effectiveness, worker and client satisfaction, etc. The professors say a best practice consistently shown to raise employee satisfaction is, “Employee participation should be allowed… in the PR process (e.g., setting goals, providing input on performance).”

Regular readers have also heard me say over and over that you cannot promote people into management without training them on how to lead people and yet expect them to succeed. Several of the appraisal best practices relate to training managers and employees on the process, and the former on how to provide feedback in a legal and respectful way. Most of us hate to give negative feedback, which is why I include that in my effective communication skills class.

If you want performance appraisals to matter to employees, then their appraisal of your appraisals has to matter. This study suggests there is a right way to review, and the professors say following it “should increase the acceptability of the information employees receive during their reviews, reduce the likelihood of complaints, and increase motivation…” If you’re a manager, that should increase your motivation to take the action below and use these “fair” practices.

Action Item: Print off the employee review process best practices and go through the list with your team. Ask members whether they think your process follows the practices, voting “yes” or “no” on each. On any in which many say “no,” work with the team to raise concerns with the “powers that be” in your organization. If you are the power that be, call me to talk about how to make things right: 919-414-8939.

In another example of people relearning a well-established truth the hard way, plaintiffs in a U.S. Supreme Court case this week found out they could not use their work pagers for “sexting.” More to the point of this blog, I hope their managers learned a similar message: don’t tell people they have rights they don’t actually have.

To both sides I say, “Duh.”

As chronicled in the court’s opinion,  two police officers in Ontario, Calif., were going way over their monthly character limits for the alphanumeric pagers they had been issued by their department. The police chief requested transcripts of their messages to determine whether he needed to pay for higher limits or people were overloading them with personal messages. It turned out their on-duty messages were mostly personal, and many were sexual. After an investigation by the internal affairs office, the officers were disciplined. The Associated Press article on the case notes, “a police official… informally told officers that no one would audit their text messages if the officers personally paid for charges above a monthly allowance.” However, that was wrong. The city had a written policy to the contrary, and that trumped whatever that person said.

Granted, the policy did not specifically mention pager text messages. But trying to play that technicality reminds me of a TV show I saw this week, in which the father told the teen-age son to take his dirty dishes “to the kitchen.” The son dropped them off on the floor just inside the doorway, and when confronted, argued the father had not said to put them in the dishwasher.

Notice that because the plaintiffs were employed by a government, they could bring the Constitution into their argument. Although many employees seem to think otherwise, by itself the Constitution does not limit the rights of private companies. For example, a worker who claims they have a “right to free speech” about their company is simply wrong. That “right” prevents a government from censoring you (in most cases), but does not apply to a private entity unless Congress has created a law saying you have a right. Whistleblower rights–legal protections for people who report lawbreaking by their employers–exist because of federal law. (Usual disclaimer: I ain’t a lawyer, this is not legal advice, contact a lawyer for specifics).

Since my first exposure to this topic in a grad school Media Law course, I have seen case after case where employees were fired for doing personal stuff on computers, including moral and perfectly legal activities like side-business work.  There are exceptions, but generally speaking, since the office computer and telephone are owned by the company, the company can do whatever it wants with them. That usually includes watching or listening to what you are doing.

That said, I’ve also seen cases where the decision hinged on whether the company had a specific policy and enforced it consistently. My guess would be that if a company president was seen using his office computer to play online poker, and the company did not have an employee handbook saying otherwise, the courts might back someone who was fired for lawful personal use of their company computer. In “employment-at-will” states, where employers can fire someone for any reason not specified as against the law, even that argument might be hard to make. Nonetheless, not only are formal policies smart from the legal standpoint, they also are the ethical thing to do, giving people fair warning about how you define right-and-wrong.  Most of us think what we consider right should be obvious to everyone else, but you know that isn’t the way human beings work.

For employees, the AP article says, it is a “common-sense message”: “Use your own cell phone if you’ve got something to text that you don’t want your boss to read.” I would add a common-sense message to employers, which is to have a written policy on personal use you reinforce regularly. Since the City of Ontario did that, another common-sense message goes out to supervisors, which is, don’t interpret company policies on your own. If you aren’t absolutely sure how a policy impacts an employee question, go ask whoever is responsible for the policy.

Unfortunately, as I’ve long said, I prefer to call this kind of thinking “horse sense.” There seem to be more horses than there are people who have that sense, so it isn’t all that common.