Evaluating employees the right way.

• Position: Personnel - Brief Article

Employee evaluation should start early, when management, using a focused selection process, chooses the right person for the job, argues Daniel O. Lybrook, associate professor of organizational leadership and supervision, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind. "In a more perfect world, all employees would begin their orientation by being shown around, not just where the break room is, but also where the real culture and history of the business or organization lives. The new hire needs to know not just what the company espouses, but also the truth about what it really values. This requires organizational self-awareness and reflection. A good evaluation process is knitted into everything--job expectations, career path, compensation, [and] advancement--in a healthy organization. It is important to the employee to understand what he or she is to give and to get."

Talk to most managers, and they will say that evaluations dived them from the real work of the company--producing and making money. Talk to most employees, and they will say management doesn't evaluate or does a poor job of it. So why don't more businesses use the employee evaluation process more effectively? Lybrook says that, on a basic human level, people don't like to be evaluated themselves, so they tend not to like evaluating others. "Many managers view the process itself as threatening and leading to conflict on interpersonal and organizational levels. One way to reduce potential conflict is to avoid it. This leads to the once-a-year `You did a good job. See you next year' syndrome."

He maintains that short-term demands on managers to produce keep employee performance reviews from being a more meaningful long-term evaluative and developmental tool. "Evaluations tend to be an unexamined part of the corporate culture. They aren't seen...