A few years ago I worked with a fire department that did not do performance evaluations for any of its members. The attitude on this department was that if you did something extraordinarily good, you got a written commendation. If you did something particularly bad, you were written up and disciplined.
Between these two extremes, everyone was assumed to be doing an adequate job and was treated equally in terms of performance.
I felt very conflicted when I heard about this system. It was certainly an exception to the rule that most departments follow, that performance evaluations are necessary, useful and something that should be done on a regular basis with quantitative results.
What about feedback? What about distinguishing among candidates during promotional processes?
But the more I thought about it, the more logic there was to this department’s approach. Performance evaluations should be useful and constructive, but they’re usually not.
‘Fraudulent and bogus’
Studies show that up to 90 percent of workers dislike the performance review process and nearly as many managers dislike giving them. Samuel Culbert, professor of management at UCLA, wrote a much-discussed op-ed in the Wall Street Journal several years ago calling performance reviews “fraudulent, bogus, and supportive of bad management.”
For many organizations, the problems with performance evaluations start with the system itself. Quantitative scales for measurement became widely used in the 1960s and 1970s, but in many cases, applying such scales to many of the performance criteria makes little sense.
For example, is it really possible to rate employees on a scale of one to 10 on whether they show up to work on time, or wear the proper uniform? And are such questions really applicable in a six-month or annual evaluation anyway? Shouldn’t problems such as these be addressed immediately, either through informal coaching or formal discipline?
Other types of rating criteria are problematic for different reasons. Too many evaluations still include categories for things like attitude or being a team player.
Out-of-balance scales
To give a rating in these areas requires the evaluator to make a completely subjective judgment, a conclusion based on his or her personal experience and biases. How is it possible to rate such qualities on a scale of one to 10?
Further, many fire departments do little or no training on how to do performance evaluations, and little attention is given to rater consistency. This fact in itself discredits the validity of the evaluation process in quantitative terms.
If one officer thinks a firefighter is doing a fine job, he might give that person all eights and nines on his evaluation. But that firefighter’s previous officer, with a similar opinion, might have given him all nines and 10s.
So even though that firefighter’s performance might have improved since the last evaluation, the result is that he has been downgraded (and no doubt demoralized) due to the process itself.
Performance evaluations are further undermined by the logistics of doing them. When evaluations are only done annually, it is easy to fall into the bias of weighting recent events more heavily than something that happened six months earlier.
Add to this the fact that many officers find themselves doing performance evaluations for people they have worked with only sporadically and may have only limited experience with.
The result is often a centering tendency as a way of being safe. If the rating scale is one to 10, then evaluators will give a lot of sevens and eights. Evaluations done in this way have little meaning and are mostly a waste of everyone’s time.
A better mousetrap
It is possible to do better. Some organizations have moved away from quantitative performance reviews to a more qualitative yet still structured discussion of goals and accomplishments.
But doing evaluations in this way is a much more difficult process, and requires training and commitment at all levels of the organization. Training would need to take place regarding the specific system being used, and if quantitative scales are used at all, they must be normed through regular sessions aimed at developing rater consistency.
Feedback is not useful if only given once a year in a generic way. Everyone on the department needs to learn how to give and receive feedback, and officers must be coached and supported to seek out feedback from their crews as well as give useful feedback on a regular basis.
The ability to give useful and constructive feedback is a key element of leadership, but it is not one that comes naturally to most people.
The good news is that this is a skill that can be learned. Openness to feedback can become an organizational value that is practiced all the time, not just once a year when performance evaluations are done.
Performance evaluations can be a useful way to summarize feedback over time and check in on stated goals. But for the process to really work, it must be transparent, meaningful and embraced at all levels on the department.
Without this relevance and buy-in, the performance evaluation process can often be little more than a waste of time, and sometimes can do more harm than good.
