Posted by Elizabeth Counts on Wed, Jul 28, 2010 @ 12:35 PM
In many parts of America, high school students who aren’t college bound have limited options. In Pennsylvania’s Reading and Muhlenberg School Districts, students enjoy broader educational horizons. Through work-based learning opportunities in 31 programs, the Reading Muhlenberg Career & Technology Center (RMCTC) prepares students for careers or for post-secondary education.
RMCTC teachers follow educational best practices to help students compete in the workplace. Using PerformancePAM Talent Management software, school administrators initiated a unique process to help teachers achieve this goal.
Promoting Best Practices
Among their tenured teachers, RMCTC stresses professional development versus performance evaluation. “In my opinion, the clinical supervision method to improve pedagogy is not effective. When an administrator observes a class, teachers tend to present their best lesson and students are on their best behavior. As a result, it’s an artificial environment,” says Administrative Director Gerald Witmer.
To counteract this, RMCTC administrators invite tenured teachers to participate in a voluntary professional development process. (Last year, 100% of eligible teachers participated.) The first day of school, each teacher receives a signed satisfactory evaluation form based on their previous year’s performance. Unless they commit a serious infraction, they retain a satisfactory rating. Gerald explains the reasoning for this approach. “To improve performance, teachers must let their guard down and admit when they’re struggling with a particular aspect of teaching. They won’t mention weaknesses on an evaluation form because these invariably show up as a negative.”
To overcome this obstacle, RMCTC asked PerformancePAM to customize a professional development module. “Instead of an evaluation rubric, we designed a rubric to facilitate professional development. PerformancePAM allowed us to identify growth needs of individual teachers and to identify which teachers use best practices,” Gerald explains, adding, “This allowed us to provide the resources, workshops and peer support necessary for improvement. I can, for example, pair a teacher who is gifted in classroom management with one who’s struggling. They can then work together to improve the situation.”
A Teacher Tailored Process
The ability to customize PerforamancePAM made it attractive to Gerald Witmer.
“To review teaching methods, we created a software rubric defining areas of responsibility, such as curriculum and classroom management. We also identified necessary skills and had three rating levels: 1) needs development; 2) meets expectations; or 3) exceeds expectations. Next, we identified elements teachers could review to see where they place within the three levels.”
Working on a computer, teachers rate themselves in 45 areas within the rubric. When they’re finished, their supervisors complete the same process. Neither party can see each other’s responses. When both are done, a report is generated which demonstrates any differences of opinion. The supervisor and teacher discuss inconsistencies and an agreement is reached. Finally, PerformancePAM generates a report on individual teachers and the entire faculty to help RMCTC create a professional development plan for the school year. “This allows us to target individual and group needs and make good use of our limited professional development resources,” Gerald says.
Discovering a Software Solution
Gerald Witmer found PerformancePAM in a roundabout way. “I had a vision for what our software had to accomplish, but didn’t think a packaged product could align with our needs. I asked a software developer if he knew any programmers who could write a program like the one I envisioned. While attending a national industry conference, the programmer connected with PerformancePAM creators Pamela and Scott Perryman and reached the conclusion that PerformancePAM was 90% turnkey for our purposes.”
PerformancePAM was customized beyond its existing capabilities to meet RMCTC’s objectives. Set up of the rubric, users and permission access were done remotely. “It’s cool—I can give control of my screen to a member of the PerformancePAM technical support team who easily shows me what I need to do. They’ve been good to work with and have quickly resolved any issues we had,” Gerald comments.
PerformancePAM is entering its second year of use at RMCTC, and user feedback remains positive. “Our teachers love it. I’ve seen teachers encouraging their colleagues, saying, ‘You want to be part of this.’ They appreciate having ownership in the process. It’s a meaningful tool that meets their needs. It helps them admit weaknesses without feeling threatened and allows administrators to provide the necessary professional development.”
Indirectly, Gerald Witmer is seeing improvement in students, too. Academic scores, trade and technical assessments and attendance are increasing. “All of our goal indicators are improving, so I think that means teachers are doing a better job engaging kids. The software process has to have played a role in that.”
Posted by Elizabeth Counts on Mon, Jun 28, 2010 @ 08:38 AM
Talent Management is an important tool in business and it is aimed at bettering the performance of individuals with organizational activity. It typically incorporates training, education and development. However, what does this all mean and why is it important for your company to practice it?
Talent Management involves the efforts of both the individual and the company. It is a joint ongoing effort that is aimed at upgrading the employee’s knowledge, skills and abilities in relation to the job they do, ensuring that they become the beneficiary of the organization as well as themselves. To achieve the best results from this effort you have to balance the career goals of the employee and the company’s requirement to get work done as efficiently as possible. This is true regardless of the level of the job, although the scale of the management will vary significantly given the scope of roles within the company.
Why implement a talent management process? The simple and most obvious reason would be that an emphasis in talent management can make a major difference to a company’s performance. A better trained or developed workforce can accomplish more as employees achieve more skills and experience with advantages for both individual and organization. The result would be a more efficient company and a happier workforce who can enjoy what they are doing and take more pride in their work. The payoff of this efficiency will be reflected in the company’s services to their customers.
Retaining employees that have spent time and effort growing into an organization is one of the main concerns for a company. It is time consuming and expensive looking for new staff and then having to start again. Offering employees an opportunity to improve their skills and performance, as well as develop new skills is often an important factor in staff staying with their employer. This growth and expansion is also going to be extremely beneficial to the company also.
Assessing the employee’s performance including areas of strength as well as weakness would usually be the first step in implementing a talent management process and typically can lead to a discussion between both parties culminating in a development plan or outline of steps to be taken to achieve necessary goals. It is also important to have a method in place to monitor this development. It will often involve training, educating and eventually developing the ways in which the employee’s tasks can be completed more efficiently, as well as encouraging the employee to develop new skills. These areas can be tracked and monitored with a talent management system to ensure efficient deployment of these processes resulting in happier employees and a stronger organization.
How has your company addressed talent management with your employees?
Posted by Elizabeth Counts on Wed, Dec 02, 2009 @ 09:18 AM
There are two schools of thought on review dates. The first school believes that employees should be reviewed on a yearly basis, at the anniversary of their employment. This method staggers the reviews of employees over the course of any given year. The second school believes that employees should all be reviewed once per year, at the same time, regardless of when they joined the organization.
Most experts now agree that, except in the case of new employees, one annual review for all employees is the more beneficial approach. The benefits of reviewing all employees at the same time are:
-
Consistency: When managers are required to review all employees during the same time period, it eliminates bias from the review process. If each employee were reviewed throughout the year on an anniversary date, the mood of the manager (either positive or negative), might affect the performance evaluation.
-
Compensation: Reviewing employees all at the same time (preferably at the end of the organization's fiscal year), makes planning compensation easier. This is especially true if the organization intends on ranking employees by a review "score" and then recommending compensation increases and promotions based on those scores.
- Momentum: No matter when reviews happen, they take a considerable amount of manager time and energy. When the review requirements are spread out throughout the year, review dates have a tendency to slip. When they occur all at the same time, with an organization-mandated deadline, the reviews are more likely to be completed.
Perhaps the only time not to complete an annual, all-at-one-time review is in the case of new employees. It is a good policy to review a new employee after the first three or six months. That employee should still be reviewed with the rest of the employees at year-end, with the interim acting as a supporting document.
When you implement PAM Web, the performance appraisal management cycle can be determined by individual employee, by group, or by company. A performance appraisal software like PAM will start the review process on the schedule that you determine.
Posted by Elizabeth Counts on Mon, Aug 31, 2009 @ 12:11 PM
You can design performance appraisal templates that provide the best review for individuals and their job functions. PAM allows you to design performance review forms that meet all the requirements for good evaluations. These are:
- Simplicity: PAM's templates provide the option for easy, automated rating, based on criteria that are pre-defined. Comments can be required or not, but reviewers always have the option of entering comments when providing input. All appraisals have a similar look and feel, but with specific features turned on or off, depending on the measurement criteria that your company requires. Upon the completion of a review or an approval, the appraisal can be printed at the click of a button. For reviewers, their comments print. For supervisors, all comments print, providing clear justification for recommended salaries.
- Scaled Scoring: Evaluation forms that have rating scales (e.g., "1 to 5" or "Excellent to Poor") are most effective because they are objective in nature, and easy to compare across other employees. In addition to the scale, it is important that the form has a place to provide a brief reason for any particular rating (like a specific example of the attribute in action). When there are many employees all doing the same task (e.g., a team of customer service representatives), it is advisable to use a wider scale for comparison purposes (e.g., 1 to 10).
PAM allows you to customize rating schemes. Unique rating schemes can be associated with an individual employee, an individual appraisal, a group of employees, measurement criteria
- Free-form Comments: While the majority of the evaluation form should use scales of some type, there should also be at least one "essay" section, where the manager can give an overall impression of the employee. This adds life to the form and gives the reviewer an opportunity to address positives or negatives not covered by the structured section of the form.
PAM has free-form text sections to allow comments of unlimited length.
- Feedback Section: On each review form, there should be two signature lines (one for the reviewing manager to sign, and the other for the employee to sign). There should also be a section where employees can formally respond to the review with comments. This allows the employee's "voice to be heard" before signing off on the accuracy and acceptance of the evaluation.
PAM's automated appraisal form prints at the click of a button with signature lines and feedback comments for the employee.
- Obtain Approval: Before implementing any performance appraisal process, review the choices and options with your company's management and legal department. Given that documented performance reviews may be used in legal proceedings, it is crucial that the forms do not violate any employment laws (e.g., anything to do with age, sex or religion should be avoided).
Posted by Elizabeth Counts on Wed, Jul 01, 2009 @ 07:49 AM
The performance appraisal process can be taxing to implement in any organization. Maybe you're still passing paper appraisals around the office or maybe you've taken it up a step and are using Excel spreadsheets. Either way, seeing the process through from beginning to end can be quite a consuming job for managers and HR professionals. The right type of performance appraisal software can make this activity much easier. So how can employee appraisal software make your life easier? We'll look at five ways.
1. Automation - How much time do you spend chasing after performance appraisals that are past due? With performance appraisal software, the "chasing" will be done for you. Many programs will remind reviewers that an appraisal is ready to be scored and will also remind them when appraisals are due.
2. Phrase selection - Do you or your managers struggle for the right words to use to illustrate an employee's performance? Phrase selectors can be found in a performance appraisal software. They are often arranged by competency and sometimes by role. The phrases range from reflecting excellent performance to performance in need of much improvement. This assistance can speed up the appraisal process and help prevent inappropriate wording of an employee's performance.
3. 360 degree review - If your organization is interested in administering 360 degree reviews, performance appraisal software is indispensable. Deploying 360 degree reviews this way allows for anonymity that is critical to honest feedback when one is reviewing his peers and especially his supervisor.
4. HRMS integration - If your performance appraisal system can integrate with your HRMS software (PAM integrates with Sage Abra and other HRMS solutions), this can aid and enhance the review process exponentially. With PAM, managers have access to job history, salary information, attendance records, and more. Having this information at your fingertips when completing an appraisal can not only speed along the process but also provide a clearer picture of the employee.
5. Web-based - Web-based performance management systems allow for collaboration among employees that are not located in the main office. They also allow for non-employees to contribute to the process. For example, you might wish to include customers or consultants in the performance review process, as they might have different insights into an employee's work than a manager would.
Performance appraisals can seem like a daunting task, but there are tools that make it simple!
What else do you wish was made easier for you with performance management?