What are your thoughts on evaluating an employee?s performance based on what a manager thinks he or she deserves, as opposed to what his or her work entails? Support your rationale with examples

The importance of job performance forms is imperative for this reason. It is important what a manager thinks of the employee to say the contrary would just be false, but a job performance report systematically reviews employees on consistent skills and performance. It requires the manager to evaluate the employee’s skills and outcomes and makes it more difficult to slant the entire report to their way of thinking. A manager can still give a negative report but will need to back up the report with examples of not meeting the previously agreed upon jobs and performances. If the manager has a bias for or against the employee it may be easier to prove with a consistent job performance report.

In recent years, there has been a concern of grade inflation within academia. Do you think a case could be made for performance appraisals being inflated? Why or why not.

I have been involved in the discussion as an educator of grade inflation within academia and educators having performance appraisals inflated. In the field of education I would agree with both of these statements, but in the business arena I have not experience the same inflation. As a teacher I would be evaluated every year for my first two years and then every other year after I received seniority. Being evaluated consisted of having my principal come in twice during the year and observe a lesson. My student’s grades nor their success or failure were included in my evaluation. When I joined the business world and started being evaluated it was a stark contrast. I was evaluated on my job performance and my results. It was no longer good enough to do a good job I had to accomplish something while doing a good job. My marketing metrics were taken in to account of my total job performance.

Are the intangibles, such as personality, attitude, and behavior, as important to consider when evaluating an employee as his or her work product? Provide some examples to help explain your rationale.

I believe that intangibles such as personality, attitude and behavior should be included when performing a job performance analysis. In many positions personality, attitude and behavior make the position successful or not. The three positions I think of when I think of these intangibles being imperative are nurses, sales people, and customer service.
In the frontline of the health care industries nurses need to have more than just the medical book knowledge acquired in Nursing School. Nurses must have what is known as “bedside manner”. They are required to have certain intangible qualities that make them successful dealing with patients, families and doctors. These should be and are included in many nurses’ job analysis performance forms.
Salespeople must confront constant rejection in their daily quest for leads; effectively using intangible skills will make or break a successful salesperson. They must have and outgoing personality, a positive attitude and professional behavior to represent the company they are selling for effectively. If they do not possess these skills they will be unable to successfully meet their sales quotas.
Customer Service deals mainly with customers that are not currently pleased with their company’s services or goods. Customer service representatives must positively handle negative situations to keep customers happy and coming back for more. Intangibles would be a huge part of a CSR’s job performance.
In all of these positions it is important to have goals and expectations set that exhibit what successful models of these intangibles look and sound like. If a worker knows what success looks like they will be able to attempt to duplicate it in their daily work assignments.

What are your thoughts on evaluating an employee?s performance based on what a manager thinks he or she deserves, as opposed to what his or her work entails? Support your rationale with examples.

When evaluating an employee’s performance some may question if the evaluation should be based on what a manager thinks he or she deserves, as opposed to what his or her work entails. I am a believer that an employee should be evaluated on what his or her work entails. A manager needs to define performance so employees and teams know what is expected of them. Employees can then focus on effective performance. Managers should set three key elements: goals, measures, and assessment. Then it is necessary for managers to use appraisals when evaluating employees. Appraisal provide legal justification , criteria, feedback, identify developmental needs, and diagnose organizational problems. A manager that would choose to assess an employee purely on what the manager thinks of them as opposed to work details sets themselves up for possible legal actions if an employee feels they were evaluated unfairly. Appraisals allow all employees to be judged on equal standards.

Diversity: DQ4

Being a former educator I believe training is a powerful tool in creating a diverse working environment. Allowing workers to understand the diversity around them can permit them to appreciate the differences that surround them and be able to use that diversity to the advantage of the organization. As a manager of a diverse workforce it is important to focus on bringing in the best talent, establishing mentor programs among employees and hold staff accountable for meeting diversity goals. There are five factors that account for companies increasing attention to diversity:
1. Shift from manufacturing to service focus
2. The globalization of markets
3. New business strategies that will require more teamwork
4. Mergers and alliances that require different corporate cultures to work together
5. Changing labor market
I believe if there were diversity issues within the workplace that training would help employees to see the workplace through the eyes of others around them.

Memo: Week 1 Assignment

MEMO TO: Sales Managers
FROM: MaryEllen Gibson
DATE: January 26, 2008
RE: Management Behavior

With all of the recent changes occurring with our developing merger with Envirotech I felt it was important to get back to the basics of management. Our sales staff will be joined with 50 Envirotech sales people and we need to review the basics of our sales management team regarding; management’s behavior and the impact it can have on the productivity of Intercleans workers, types of management actions that are in line with employment laws and those that are not, and some best practices for working within a diverse work environment.

Management’s behavior has demonstrable effects on the productivity of our Interclean’s sales force. We will be expecting managers to make a case forcefully for greater investments in their sales teams. We need to be able to prove that this investment in training will outweigh the cost and prove to be a worthy investment of time for employees. Since our sales team will now be highly trained we will be observing behavior costing of employees. This means we will be assigning dollar estimates to areas such as absenteeism, turnover, and job performance. This will give us the ability to track the Return of Investment in all of the additional training. Managements’ reports will also be different; all of management’s reviews will be based on the Sears’ model. One third of the report will be based on employee measures, one third on customer’s measures and the final one third will be based on the traditional investor measures we have used in the past. Remember if you are still not sure how this report will be calculated please speak with Janet Durham in Human Resources she has had many questions and will be happy to answer any additional ones. If you still feel like you are not 100% clear on this method feel free to schedule a half an hour meeting with me and I will review the report form we are using.

Please review the employment laws and updates listed on the company intranet and be sure to take the accompanying test. Your test will be due to Human Resources no later than ten calendar days from this memo. Remember that Interclean abides by all local, state, and federal regulations not to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, sex, and physical disability. I know that a few members of the sales team have added new members to their families and a few are taking care of elderly parents remember to fully read The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) this will help you to answer any questions they may have regarding this leave and help them make plans before filling the paper work with Human Resources. We are having Risk Management and our Attorneys review all “seniority” laws for the sales team. Human Resources will then create the Interclean policy on seniority since the new sales staff will be merging with our current staff. I will keep you updated on any policy changes that may occur during this altering time.

Finally, our sales team will be more diverse than ever before. This gives us all an opportunity to grow with this diversity. We mirror our diverse community and this will help our sales team reach even more markets. Remember the Janet Durham diversity training she said there were five factors that accounted for Intercleans increasing attention to diversity:
1. Our shift from manufacturing to service focus
2. The globalization of our markets
3. Our new business strategies that will require more teamwork
4. Mergers and alliances that require different corporate cultures to work together
5. Our changing labor market
If you would like more information on the diversity of our workforce please visit our intranet in the Human Resources section “Intercleans growth and diversity”. I was also informed that our new sales training will be focusing a section to selling in our diverse world market. This will be an outstanding opportunity to grow your sales and that of your teams in our diverse culture.

In conclusion, let’s take this time before our sales force nearly doubles to review basic management skills. Our teams will be stronger if we keep in mind and review the basics of our sales management team regarding; management’s behavior and the impact it can have on the productivity of Intercleans workers, types of management actions that are in line with employment laws and those that are not, and some best practices for working within a diverse work environment.

Today is dragging. I am looking forward to next week when things get moving again.