work assessment blues

In my last post, I somewhat humorously discussed the benefits and disadvantages of being your own boss. One of the greatest advantages is that you always know how you are performing and how it affects your business. This is, unfortunately, not always the case when you work for someone else.

The primary means of letting employees know of their progress is to establish regular meetings with your employees to discuss their performance. When I worked for one of the Baby Bell telephone companies, performance reviews were always one of those things that seemed to be forgotten. They were low on the priority list, and as employees we knew not to bring it up, for fear of retribution. The last thing that you wanted to do was to go over your manager's head for skipping your review. Those who tried this tactic didn't get the best belated reviews, and you just had to wonder if there wasn't some ill-feeling embedded in it on behalf of the manager.

I suspect that much of the procrastination on the part of management had to do with the manual review process. The company forms were very time consuming and often very vague. In fact, on many occasions, the managers simply asked us to write our own reviews. They would then review them, add a few comments here and there, and call it a done deal.

The sad truth is that performance reviews don't have to be so difficult. For one thing, managers who are able to spend more time interfacing with their employees could easily provide impromptu reviews at regular intervals and then combine those notes into a formal review when it is time. Company review templates need to be more detailed and to-the-point. One easy way to assist in the review process would be to pick up some employee review software. After all, my managers never had problems sitting behind their computers and typing their time away. It was the time that they needed to spend away from their computers, sitting face-to-face with an employee in a conference room that they seemed to avoid.

The ManagerAssistant software that I linked to above even provides a free 14-day risk-free demo. So here's a quick tip for all of the managers out there, who are wasting time each week inventing new excuses as to why you haven't finished writing your employee reviews...

Please, just pick up some software and see if it helps. We know that you're not lazy. We know that you have good things to say, and are just having difficulty putting them down on paper. But most of all, let us know how we are doing every so often. Most human beings have an innate desire to "do better" and if you give us the chance, you might just find that the time you spend enlightening us on our progress can lead to a better work experience for you, as well.