In my last column, I talked about how to establish performance metrics. Today I am going to discuss one of the most difficult aspects of managing individual employee performance – writing employee performance standards.

In my experience, this is one of the tasks that supervisors struggle with the most; even though it is one of the most important. After all, if employees don’t know what is expected of them, how they going to achieve management’s expectations? How are their supervisors going to be able to rate them? What will be the basis for giving out awards? What criteria will they use to distinguish between employees when making decisions regarding promotions?

As you can see, if performance standards are not written properly, all sorts of problems can arise. For one thing, when there are no real standards to speak of, the supervisors wind up making subjective performance appraisal/awards determinations of their employees. This often results in the employees feeling they are being treated unfairly, because they can’t predict what their ratings will be and when they receive them, don’t understand the bases for their ratings and/or awards (or lack thereof.) When this happens, people start to gripe to each other, morale drops and grievances and EEO complaints follow.

From the supervisors’ perspective, they often dread the end of the appraisal cycle because they fear they will have to make determinations based on gut rather than fact and will then have to defend their decisions with little or no data. Many know they will face the wrath of their employees and the union because they will be forced to support ratings and awards determinations based on indefensible performance standards.

Writing Performance Standards

So how do you go about writing employee performance standards? In my experience, from the perspective of performance management, there are two types of positions: 1) transactional types of jobs that are relatively easy to measure (e.g. claims processors, processing clerks, certain financial-type positions, etc.); and 2) all other jobs that are not so easy to measure (management analysts, attorneys, researchers, etc.) Let’s look at ways you can write standards for each type of jobs.

Jobs that are relatively easy to measure

These types of positions should be broken down into categories such as the following:

• Productivity or output
• Quality
• Timeliness
• Customer satisfaction
• Organization support/teamwork

The first four measures, if they can be tracked, should reflect the following: For productivity: the number of widgets completed on average for a finite period. For quality: the person’s accuracy rate based on at least a random sample of his work. For timeliness: the average time it takes for the employee to perform one or more tasks. For customer satisfaction: the degree to which customers (external and/or internal) are satisfied with the employee’s work, based on the results of a periodic customer survey. The fifth measure, organization support/teamwork, will most likely be a softer measure which could be tracked based on a mix of factors (the supervisor’s observation, list of the employee’s accomplishments over and above her normal duties, complaints against the employee and/or her work, etc.)

The key here is to have measures that are clear, relate to the employee’s job and are easy to track; preferably on an electronic basis. Under such a system, the best approach is to also provide the employee with monthly feedback, via some form of a report card, so the employee knows exactly how he is doing relative to his standards and peers. In this way there should be no surprises come the end of the appraisal cycle.

Jobs that are not relatively easy to measure

These are the jobs that supervisors struggle to write the performance standards, the end-of-year appraisal, etc. That is because the work is more difficult to quantify, so the supervisors wind up writing such generic standards that no one really knows what they mean.

In my view, the best way to write standards for employees who occupy these types of positions is by tracking each project they complete using the same categories shown above. That is, keep track of the number of projects completed per employee, the timeliness of each project (e.g. a report; an analysis, etc.) they are assigned (perhaps using a spreadsheet); and then conduct a quality review of the assignment when submitted to you. If you keep track of each project in this way, you will know each employee’s output (number of projects completed), timeliness (percentage completed on time) and quality (accuracy rate based on preferably a weighted) average of all the projects completed. If you do this, you will actually have plenty of documentation to support your decision

Moreover, if you share the documentation with the employees on a monthly basis, they will know exactly how they are doing and that should result in a reduction in complaints and an improvement in morale.

With respect to customer satisfaction, consider conducting surveys of the people they give advice to. A weighted or un-weighted average of these surveys coupled with the supervisor’s observations, should provide an excellent basis for rating the employee in this category. As for organization support/teamwork, I recommend you follow the same approach for these types of positions as for the jobs that are easier to measure.

If management uses the tools and techniques I am recommending, they will have a better and fairer performance management system. In addition, it will remove a lot of the traditional stress the supervisors feel at appraisal time and by the same token, provide the employees with the sense that management is truly serious about treating everyone fairly and equitably. 

 Stewart Liff writes on human resources management issues in government for OhMyGov. A recipient of the President's Council on Management Improvement Award, he is the author of five books, including the just-released Improving the Performance of Government Employees. His expertise includes employee relations, labor relations, Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), performance management, staffing, training, rewards and recognition, metrics, systems design and succession planning.