Evaluating work performance involves HR expertise and may involve management personnel. Labor standards quantify job performance using benchmarks, which can be more challenging in service jobs. Performance appraisal data is used to improve productivity and ensure job standards match individual skills. Pitfalls include lowering morale and perceived inequality.
Work performance is the sum total of a worker’s performance of assigned tasks. Grouping, assigning, analyzing, and evaluating a worker’s job performance typically involves HR expertise. Management personnel may also be involved in these areas of responsibility, due to their knowledge of overall production and workflow.
Labor standards quantify job performance in objective and subjective terms, typically using benchmarks to assess how well the worker met the employer’s expectations over a given period of time. In manufacturing settings, these benchmarks can be geared towards easily measurable outcomes, such as assessing an individual employee’s job capacity to achieve a given production quota. In service jobs, results can be specific, based on criteria such as the number of complaining customers or a decline in sales. Accurately evaluating performance in these situations, however, is often more challenging than in manufacturing settings where individual output can be measured mathematically. In both cases, an individual’s general attitude is also commonly evaluated.
In operations involving many workers, there may be a separate department or even multiple departments within the organization that are responsible for evaluating job performance. In smaller organizations, it may affect only a few people or even one person in a very small organization or business. If the workers are members of a union, job requirements and job evaluations can be negotiated by the union. In such cases, managers have less flexibility to change these requirements.
Management uses performance appraisal data to make operational decisions that will improve productivity. Since human behavior is an important component of job performance, a managerial task is to ensure that job standards not only match production tasks exactly, but also that the individual’s skills are well matched to the tasks. If a worker fails to evaluate performance, the problem may lie in a job description mismatch with the employee. This can occur if the duties of a particular position evolve slowly over time.
If there are gaps between the two, further professional training or review of training protocols can correct the gap. Sometimes, the individual has to be reassigned to an area that provides a better match, or the person is fired by the employer and replaced with another person. Job performance appraisals are typically performed annually for long-term workers and, more often, in the first year of a new hire.
There are pitfalls inherent in evaluating a worker’s performance that companies try to avoid. Improper handling of an assessment can result in lowering a worker’s morale or building enmity with other workers who may perceive real or imagined inequality. Correctly quantifying performance through objective measures can help a company avoid some of these pitfalls.
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