Rating

Page 1 of 3 At the conclusion of the performance management process, managers must determine if employees have achieved their stated goals. This is the critical point where employees often make a judgment about whether or not they believe the company’s performance management process is fair. If goals are well written with clear measures of success, the evaluation process – often called the final rating – is fairly straightforward. The final rating requires managers to assign a score using the company’s rating system. And if managers have been good about discussing performance and providing effective feedback and coaching throughout the performance period, the result of the final evaluation does not come as a surprise to the employee being evaluated. CUX research determined that rating systems vary from company to company, with scales ranging from as few as 3 points to as many as 7 points. Several companies reported having changed their rating scales recently for differing reasons. For example, one company said it recognized there was no scoring option to indicate that a person was new to a job and still in a learning mode. Managers felt uneasy having to rate people in those transition periods as “Unsatisfactory” if they had demonstrated solid performance yet fallen short of the goal. Another company said labels on its original scale ranged from “far exceeds” to “failed to meet” indicating complete success to complete failure. The organization opted for a new scale to describe varying degrees of accomplishment using the following revised terminology: Outstanding Highly successful Successful Learning Needs improvement (Defines a situation that requires an employee to get performance back on track.) Another organization said it changed from a 5-point to a 7-point scale to see if it would alter the percentage of people whose performance was ranked in the middle. The change actually increased the number of people falling into the middle. Another organization said it moved to a 4-point scale so that managers could not easily default to a neutral point on the rating scale. << Start < Prev 1 2 3 Next > End >>