Do you know anyone who looks forward to year-end reviews? Yeah, me neither. Managers don’t like giving them. Employees don’t like getting them. But it’s important to document job performance and goals, and in some cases this is the only true feedback employees receive. (Managers should be providing feedback all year, but some don’t.) As a field service manager, what can you do to make sure you give a great year-end review? Here are five suggestions for how to do it right.
1. Get it done on time. This advice may seem pretty silly. What difference does it make whether the review happens in December or January? Well, it makes a lot of difference to your employees, especially if there’s a raise attached to the review. Employees who don’t get their reviews on time often feel neglected. That’s not the right way to round out the year. And if your year-end review includes goals for next year, putting it off means you’re setting up your employees to be behind in their goals before the new year even starts.
To keep reading, click here: How Not to Screw Up Your Year-End Reviews
I am assuming that these reviews are based on how one performs job in a preset baseline ( sales achieved, profit, cost control, etc) as all of this information is on those spreadsheets that the shareholders perceive as forward progress. Included in that is how labor costs are kept low by “supposedly “ increasing productivity of employees and using less to do more. Nothing in these reviews expects any feedback as all of it is computed by the results seen on the spreadsheet. What makes it worse is the kickback cuts to cost and expected profits by corporate spending.
Without feedback for the individual these reviews are basically a paper trail for companies for layoffs, which is why people dread reviews.
My company has a 3 point scale for reviews: Needs improvement, meets expectations, and exceeds expectations. Except the way the whole thing’s set up, needs improvement is only given to people who should probably be fired, and exceeding expectations requires you to proactively take on extra jobs and responsibilities far above your pay-grade. So pretty much everybody meets expectations in every category, no matter how good or bad they are at their job.
Kind of makes me wonder what the point of it is.