"Annual" Performance Evaluation

Bullion

Currently, our employees are evaluated on their anniversary date. We would like to change this practice to begin evaluating all employees during the first week of January. What are the pros and cons of changing this practice? We believe it would be a much easier to administer since we only have 12 employees.

TheCol

I dislike reviewing employees all at the same time. It causes comparisons, rising and falling expectations. Doing each in the month of their hiring or birthday spreads the administrative load and dampens the emotional peak at report time. This is especially true if raises, bonuses or other favorable actions are linked to the evaluation.
The Colonel

Wildsporty

It may be easier for you to administer, but doing 12 performance appraisels at the first of the year would be a huge nightmare for me. If I have one in January I typically schedule it for either the end of the month or the first of February.

I do all my Insurance and 401K renewal meetings in January. I have cost of living increases and new insurance costs to figure and imput. I typically go through and reevaluate salary ranges in January. I would not want to be doing 12 performance appraisels or even 1 performance appraisel.

Good luck to you if it is easier although I think the anniversary date makes it more unique to the employee. I wouldn't want the employees to sit around and discuss their appraisels with each other and compare as they would do if you did them all at once.

Each person is unique and should be treated on his/her merits and not on the standards of the person before them than you just did an appraisel on.

I agree with the last poster.

Shirley

ritaanz

We do it both ways. Our company has about 100 employees. The department managers and some exempt employees are reviewed in January. All of the non-exempt employees are reviewed on their anniversary date.

That means 30% of the employees get reviewed in January by the 4 VPs. The VPs like it because they get it all done in January and do not have to think about it for another year. Having followed the system here for several years, I think it would work much better if it were done on the individual's anniversary date. The VPs have the tendency to write the same things for all of their managers. Mentally, they compare one to the other, so the managers are not reviewed on their own merits. They are either better or worse then Mr/Ms Favorite Pet.

On the other hand, the reviews that are done on a monthly basis on the employee's anniversary date are well thought out, honest evaluations and excellent goal settimg. It is obvious that it is much easier to do 3 reviews a month than 6 or 7 in a week.

I know you are probably saying, the department managers are better trained to do reviews than the VPs. Ha!

Before the review program was changed to the January timetable, the VPs did the reviews on a timely basis and did an excellent job in evaluating their people. Now , I think, they find it overwhelming and want to get it done quickly and out of sight for another year.