Dealing with Performance Anxiety

Hello again, my Friends!

I hope you and yours enjoyed a Happy Easter and are coping with all those alarming and alarmistic news items and rumors about "The State of the Economy". I shall refrain from making personal comments about this unfortunate situation here and now, however.
Instead, allow me to offer the following article, courtesy: "The Business Shrink Newsletter" dated today...
Wishing you safe, healthy, fulfilled days ahead!
Your Friend always,

Jacques

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We're going to switch gears now but stay with the theme of how you view your work and your place in it. Other than ongoing self-examination, perhaps the most critical feedback mechanism you have at work is your performance appraisal or review, whatever you want to call it.

Regular appraisals are a very valuable, very vital form of maintaining mental hygiene in the office. They're critical for morale and for keeping both the business and its employees functioning at peak performance. Some experts think evaluations should be held once a year, some say twice. It could be more or less. The actual number is not the main thing. What I often hear from employees are stories of going for as much as two years time or more without one, just because their managers don't like doing it any more than they do, and so they procrastinate. I think that's a serious mistake. It's a missed opportunity for the employer as well as huge disservice for its employees, who may only get pay raises or bonuses based on their evaluations.

The real significance is that employees need the feedback and encouragement and the opportunity to correct course where that's necessary, especially if evaluations serve as the basis for determining compensation. Many employees work hard and do what they think they are supposed to be doing, only to get an unpleasant surprise at evaluation time when they find out their raise or bonus – if any new money gets added to the pay envelop – is much less than they were expecting. That's a double disservice: a worker doesn't get an opportunity to improve, then gets financially penalized for not improving. Instead of helping to strengthen the bond between management and staff, this kind of occurrence only weakens it. It hurts morale. It provides the grounds for negativity in the office. In short, it unravels everything we've been working so hard to achieve.

As with so many things we've talked about, responsibility for this lies solidly with management. Yet there are ways that employees can take initiative to improve the situation by managing up. You don't have to wait for your boss to schedule a review. On the contrary, many employers today are adopting creative approaches to evaluations in a way that allows workers to take initiative and responsibility for the process.

On my radio show I asked Sharon Armstrong, a human resources consultant for more than twenty years, to explain the seeming oxymoron in the title of her book Stress-free Performance Appraisals. “It can be stress-free if you follow some simple techniques,” she said. “For one thing, don't have it on the same day as the office holiday party.” We like to joke around on the radio!

Mainly, keeping performance appraisals stress-free requires an ongoing collaboration between the supervisor, the employee, and the workplace culture itself, a culture which is set by the executive leadership. It's part of the manager's job to create a proper, cordial environment for the evaluation meeting itself and to make sure there are no surprises. For either the employee or the evaluator. Spring an unpleasant surprise during a review on an employee, Armstrong and I agreed, and he or she may respond in a way you don't expect, a response counterproductive to the employee and the employer-employee relationship. You can avoid this if you've been doing your job all along: setting clear goals and expectations, and keeping open lines of communication throughout the year. “When the appraisal meeting happens, it should be just a summarizing or culmination of all those other discussions,” Armstrong said about ongoing routine office communication between employer and employee. What you want to avoid, according to Armstrong, are a number of mistakes that, unfortunately, are all too common, such as:

-Favoritism, and overlooking the flaws of favorite employees (or employers)

-Grouping, that is excusing below-standard performance just because, supposedly, everyone does it

-What Armstrong calls the Halo/Horns Effect, letting one particular behavior you like or dislike color your opinion of other factors

-Recency, letting some recent behavior or event block your view of what happened the rest of the evaluation period

As a manager, you want to be keeping track of employee performance continuously. Waiting until the last minute to think about an evaluation means you'll have to base your review on the most unreliable factor of all, your memory. When an employee's review time approaches, start thinking about it a at least month ahead of time so your thoughts can gel and you can get some perspective.

As an employee, you want to do much the same thing. Keep track. Document your performance and accomplishments, even if it's as simple as keeping an ongoing list in a file folder at the front of your file cabinet. Your supervisor might be good about doing this too, but sometimes people forget. It's certainly within your rights, and the professional thing to do as well, in order to make sure your accomplishments are remembered at review time. Your boss may even appreciate the reminders. And if there is any disagreement, then you have documentation to back up your case.

Some companies are even adopting an employee-driven approach to performance reviews, which managers love because it takes much of the burden off of them. The employee starts the process, brings his or her goals and results together, gets input about their performance from other people they've worked with, and fills out a self-assessment. Only then is it time for a meeting and the opportunity for a discussion that's based (theoretically) on a calm, thorough, factual evaluation. “It really brings home that this is a partnership, and it's really about the employee and his or her career,” Sharon Armstrong made clear.

One of the biggest problems with this whole process is that creating and maintaining a healthy, proactive appraisal process is the responsibility of management, but few managers have the training or experience to do it properly. Instead of providing such training and support, or ensuring that supervisors stick to their evaluation cycles, company executives seem to think that managers just know how to do it naturally. Maybe a few do, but most do not. That can only make a supervisor uncomfortable, concerned about being misunderstood, afraid of how an employee might react. No wonder so many procrastinate about the reviews, or don't put in the time to do a thorough job of it, and so make the mistakes outlined above.

Think of how this lack of training and support might play out in a situation we looked at in an earlier chapter, when someone is promoted from line staff to management within a department. Suddenly you're in a position of evaluating your friends, or being reviewed by someone you thought was your friend. What should have been a positive, career-enhancing experience for all – a promotion and a positive review and raise – can end up destroying a personal friendship.

This is why I keep stressing the importance of good mental hygiene, because that's what all of this keeps coming back to