What Criteria Should be Used in Setting Performance Standards?
Standards or objectives are based on the history of productive workers. Review the employee’s job description, assuming it is not dated, and study the department and corporation plans. These should help you to identify goals or standards against which the worker’s performance will be measured.
The goals or standards set should be defined in clear and unambiguous terms and with a definite timetable. They must be measurable, which is easy when the work is quantifiable but more difficult when it is not quantifiable. Examples of non-quantifiable measures are faster than average completion of assignments, introduction of new concepts, and contributions to team initiatives.
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Performance goals are often results that are expected of the employee and critical to the department’s operation. Standards are usually tied to output and frequently the same for each employee in the same job. For instance, a standard for copyeditors might be: Edit no fewer than twelve manuscript pages per hour. For a customer service rep: Handle no fewer than twenty phone calls per hour.
You may want to add developmental objectives, along with goals or standards. Developmental objectives reflect skills, abilities, or knowledge deficiencies that need shoring up. Let’s assume that an employee lacks know-how in statistical analysis. His goal: "to complete a course on statistical analysis by year-end." A goal doesn’t have to be tied to attendance at a course. It could be something like this: "Read The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker and identify five ways you can apply the knowledge to interactions with peers. Deadline: February 4, 200X."
If your organization promulgates a number of values, you may want to tie these to your appraisal as well. For instance, your firm might expect its employees to show initiative. This is a value. For a department administrator, the value-related goal tied to showing initiative could be: "Develop a users group to increase worker’s knowledge of search engines and identify those most useful for competitive research." For an engineer, it might be "identify less expensive ways to manufacture existing products to increase greater profit margin." If the performance factor is "collaboration," you could measure it by an administrative assistant’s ability to "fill in when colleagues are either ill or away on vacation." For the engineer, collaboration might be measured by her ability to "participate in cross-functional projects so they are completed on schedule."
All of these may be used to assess your employees’ performance.