Internal Peer Reviews
1083339
4 Posts
We are a small construction company of 51 employees. Our owner has been reading articles about peer reviews and wants to establish this for our company. Now I am not against peer reviews for professionals but the idea presented to me is that any employee would give a performance review of those that he/she comes in contact with on a daily basis. For an example a purchasing clerk could give a review of an administrative clerk, or even the controller. My fear is that even though we all work together total harmony between employees is lacking and I fear that emotions would be in the way of objective review especially if they are not aware of all the aspects of that persons job requirements. Has anyone had experience with this type of organization review? If so how has it worked for you?
Comments
We are a small construction company of 51 employees. Our owner has been reading articles about peer reviews and wants to establish this for our company. Now I am not against peer reviews for professionals but the idea presented to me is that any employee would give a performance review of those that he/she comes in contact with on a daily basis. For an example a purchasing clerk could give a review of an administrative clerk, or even the controller. My fear is that even though we all work together total harmony between employees is lacking and I fear that emotions would be in the way of objective review especially if they are not aware of all the aspects of that persons job requirements. Has anyone had experience with this type of organization review? If so how has it worked for you?
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Administered and interpreted correctly, they can still blow up in your face. A lot has to do with the culture and workforce you have. However, things like how rank and file workers view payroll may give an indiciation that the payroll person has been right all these years and payroll really should be outsourced. It could also fuel concerns that the accountant has been right all these years and the payroll person should be fired.
Personally, I do not like 360 degree feedback or peer review schemes. They usually just end up being used as a way for a senior manager to delegate his or her performance appraisal duties to the subordinates of a junior manager. There are interesting things that can be learned but I think they all get edited out for political reasons or end up costing too much in terms of hard feelings and misunderstandings.
My feelings exactly. We used to use the 360 review but I'm here to tell you all it was good for was for people's revenge or a forum to register dissatisfaction over working status, pay or other issues that is beyond the control of most supervisors. When it was used as a tool among peers then same thing would occur. There were people that were not as popular or not part of the "in" group that suffered negative reviews. Work politics would always be a big influence that was evident in the reviews. Lastly TX is exactly correct. It became a way for supervisors to avoid doing performance evaluations and undertaking improvement plans. If the employee effectually evaluates themselves why rock the boat would be the supers' attitude.
I fought these instruments as useless time wasters and was ridiculed for my stance for a long time. Guess what. . . we don't use them anymore, thank goodness. Just my experience. . .
If I may join with an additional question or twist to what you actually have found that works best, as IT HR has already done. My new current company is lacking job descriptions, an established performance evaluation system and (really) just about everything HR related. However, I am on the quest to change that! I created a 4 or 5 page “job assessment form” to streamline the job description process; it has choices for all the standards to minimize the pain associated with creating them. After creating a detailed job description with essential and non-essential functions, I was considering creating a weighted quarterly review process, with employee self-evaluation, that focuses on company standards of conduct as well as primary job functions. So the Supervisor would have to meet with the EE every 3 months and provide a numeric value to each classification and then it would have a final report card for the annual review to show the overall growth (positive or negative) for each EE. This would be another spreadsheet tracking system in excel. Then the wage scale would be structured/based on the report card, thereby creating and fostering a culture based on top level performance which would be tangible to help improving the standards on quality, productivity, safety or whatever you want to track.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
For example: teamwork would be weighted at let’s say 5, so if I am a team player I would get a 5; quality standards would be let’s say 10, so if I sometime have deficient quality (need for rework) then I would get a 7 (maybe); and so on and so on… So the final report card I would get let’s say 75 out of 100 which would be a failing grade, because maybe 80 was needed to advance to the next highest level as a gun operator.
Any feedback on this would be welcomed, but I don’t want to detract for the original question.
If I may join with an additional question or twist to what you actually have found that works best, as IT HR has already done. My new current company is lacking job descriptions, an established performance evaluation system and (really) just about everything HR related. However, I am on the quest to change that! I created a 4 or 5 page “job assessment form” to streamline the job description process; it has choices for all the standards to minimize the pain associated with creating them. After creating a detailed job description with essential and non-essential functions, I was considering creating a weighted quarterly review process, with employee self-evaluation, that focuses on company standards of conduct as well as primary job functions. So the Supervisor would have to meet with the EE every 3 months and provide a numeric value to each classification and then it would have a final report card for the annual review to show the overall growth (positive or negative) for each EE. This would be another spreadsheet tracking system in excel. Then the wage scale would be structured/based on the report card, thereby creating and fostering a culture based on top level performance which would be tangible to help improving the standards on quality, productivity, safety or whatever you want to track.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
For example: teamwork would be weighted at let’s say 5, so if I am a team player I would get a 5; quality standards would be let’s say 10, so if I sometime have deficient quality (need for rework) then I would get a 7 (maybe); and so on and so on… So the final report card I would get let’s say 75 out of 100 which would be a failing grade, because maybe 80 was needed to advance to the next highest level as a gun operator.
Any feedback on this would be welcomed, but I don’t want to detract for the original question.
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At the risk of hijacking this thread to discuss job descriptions and performance appraisals instead of peer review processes, I will say just this: administrative means to make and maintain job descriptions always start with the best of intentions a reasonable sounding processed but they still rarely get executed routinely. Job descriptions are not often viewed as business critical so the people you rely on for information to keep them up to date do not give a sustained effort. The triage process of (often over subscribed) employees with operational responsibilities will put it at the bottom of the pile until someone makes them put a half hearted effort to get it out of their in box. It's hard to get real updates any sooner than when additional or replacement head count is requisitioned. If you have honest, real support from top management, it goes easier but not much.
If I may join with an additional question or twist to what you actually have found that works best, as IT HR has already done. My new current company is lacking job descriptions, an established performance evaluation system and (really) just about everything HR related. However, I am on the quest to change that! I created a 4 or 5 page “job assessment form” to streamline the job description process; it has choices for all the standards to minimize the pain associated with creating them. After creating a detailed job description with essential and non-essential functions, I was considering creating a weighted quarterly review process, with employee self-evaluation, that focuses on company standards of conduct as well as primary job functions. So the Supervisor would have to meet with the EE every 3 months and provide a numeric value to each classification and then it would have a final report card for the annual review to show the overall growth (positive or negative) for each EE. This would be another spreadsheet tracking system in excel. Then the wage scale would be structured/based on the report card, thereby creating and fostering a culture based on top level performance which would be tangible to help improving the standards on quality, productivity, safety or whatever you want to track.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
For example: teamwork would be weighted at let’s say 5, so if I am a team player I would get a 5; quality standards would be let’s say 10, so if I sometime have deficient quality (need for rework) then I would get a 7 (maybe); and so on and so on… So the final report card I would get let’s say 75 out of 100 which would be a failing grade, because maybe 80 was needed to advance to the next highest level as a gun operator.
Any feedback on this would be welcomed, but I don’t want to detract for the original question.
[/quote]
At the risk of hijacking this thread to discuss job descriptions and performance appraisals instead of peer review processes, I will say just this: administrative means to make and maintain job descriptions always start with the best of intentions a reasonable sounding processed but they still rarely get executed routinely. Job descriptions are not often viewed as business critical so the people you rely on for information to keep them up to date do not give a sustained effort. The triage process of (often over subscribed) employees with operational responsibilities will put it at the bottom of the pile until someone makes them put a half hearted effort to get it out of their in box. It's hard to get real updates any sooner than when additional or replacement head count is requisitioned. If you have honest, real support from top management, it goes easier but not much.
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Funny! I do appreciate your sense of humor; I have had many a chuckle at some of your responses.
The creation of job descriptions is very painful, one of my least favorite functions of HR. But can you give me some feedback, please, on your company’s review process. I’m not sure, but it seems that you’re in manufacturing too. I have never been a fan of the yearly review and I see more and more company’s junking that system. Have you tried the meetings with employees on a more regular basis (either monthly or quarterly) and if you did – did you have success with it? I would like to set it up quarterly (at first). And I would like for it to be more interactive, “how can I help you and here is now I would like you to help me/company” kinda approach. Instead of it being “here’s what you haven’t done for me lately” approach.
My $0.02 on this is that the biggest hurdle is having a culture in which line supervisors actually care about the success of the employees in their charge. Too much attention to oversight and not enough attention to development. They're often not trained for it and sometimes simply don't care to do it because they just want to be the boss. Sometimes, of course, because of the way the supervisor's position is structured, they don't actually have any time to really supervise. In my world, line supervisors need to be mobile, they need to be able to do the jobs of those they supervise, they need to be great coaches, and they need to care about the success of the individuals on their team. Unfortunately, sometimes that title is given to someone who, because of the structure of their work, spends the vast majority of their time doing what their team members do, meaning they aren't actually supervising.
If your supervisors' role is set up to be mobile so they can observe, train, and motivate top performance, then you don't need a lot of formal performance appraisals. If your role is set up so that the supervisor doesn't have much better idea of what's going on than anybody else, then all the formal meetings in the world will not help. Most people are somewhere in between.
In good supervision settings, I prefer systems that give routine smaller increment rewards up to a threshold after which annual or semi-annual numbers make sense. In poor supervision settings, I prefer to make it the manager's problem/responsibility to do reviews and the earlier and more often, the better but not because the reviews will get better. Instead, so that the supervision situation may improve. Unfortunately, not every company can afford to have a supervisor who spends the majority of their time supervising, which is a shame.
Does that help?