Evaluating Employees Is Your Job

All of us, in some fashion, have to work with someone else. In my world these days, most of the time I'm working with them over the phone or in a brief encounter so I can come back to my office and work on a project. For most people, though, they have to work in close proximity with other people throughout the day.

When you're the manager of other employees, that kind of daily interaction may back off some, but this is when one really has to sharpen their evaluation skills as it pertains to those employees. If you work at a typical organization, you probably have the yearly employee evaluation you have to complete. What happens most of the time, though, is that most managers tend to remember only what's occurred within the last couple of weeks. If that's the case, then most employees are going to suffer from lackluster evaluations because of one of two reasons; either they haven't done anything spectacular in those last two weeks, or did something that will impact them negatively now.

In Peggy Klaus' book "Brag!", she talks about reasons why employees and potential employees or consultants needs to learn how to talk about themselves because the world has gotten so fast paced that most managers really don't remember when you might have done something worth remembering, and how, at times, one's work performance can be taken for granted because that person consistently might do superior work.

Well, though the same goes for managers as they try to look good themselves, the truth of the matter is that it's not really fair for most employees to have to bring these things up to managers. After all, most people are taught as children not to brag, and that their good work will show for itself. Unfortunately, that turns out not to really be true, so managers need to come up with ways to track their employees performance throughout the year so that they can give an honest appraisal of an employees talents, especially if raises will be based on those evaluations.

So it become important for managers to keep track of both good and negative behavior on a regular basis, making sure they document, in some fashion, anything that's pertinent each day or week. The fact is that, for the most part, things happen every day, but not necessarily significant things. But something will occur at least weekly, if not more often, that was either positive or negative.

Documenting good things is important; documenting negative behavior is crucial. The biggest problem most employers have when they want to terminate a bad employee is that they haven't documented the behavior, or any of the interventions they may have had with those employees, so it comes down to a hearsay argument, which the employer will always lose. I have talked to managers in helping them start to document bad behavior when they have a problem employee, but usually by the time they're starting to get around to it that employee has been making errors or causing problems for awhile already, which means they now have to go through at least a couple more months of misery with this person.

So, every manager should have something they can write on or use to document their employees. I used to create, in Word, a document for each employee, and when I was informed of something, good or bad, or saw it in action, I would document it so that I would remember what had occurred when. Of course, if I'd had to take action against an employee, it happened way before evaluation time, but I'd have my dates already recorded, as well as the infraction, so there was never any question. I know one manager who used to create index cards for employees to record things on, and another who used to journal.

But it was only the few of us who did anything at all. Most everyone else decided they didn't have time to do such things, and that's always a failing of managers. In my opinion, the most important duty of management is managing, not working, and managing means you do whatever it takes to make sure employees are doing what's expected of them, have the tools so they can do what's expected of them, and are monitored so that they know where they stand on some kind of consistent basis. Managers who don't do this are being selfish and unfair, and are probably failing both their employees and their employers.

Think about yourself when you think about this issue. If you're independent, don't you want to know that the work you're doing is what your clients want? If you work for someone else, don't you want to hear when you're doing nice work, or when your performance might not be up to par so you can do something about it? Most everyone will be thinking like you; we like to know, so we can either feel good or work on becoming better.

Own up to your responsibility; that's what we're all being paid for.