Performance Counts

Fourth-quarter business issues are starting to take center stage. Some of you are looking back on 2003 and wondering what you can expect from 2004. Whatever your goals and dreams, reaching them will be contingent upon the performance of your staff. These may include the people you too quickly hired and now must cultivate to make sure that they — and you — are successful.

While new legislative issues and changes in reimbursement may be on the forefront, the real success of your business will be based upon the personalities and motivation of those you employ.

Hire the Attitude

For months you may have searched for just the right salesperson, customer service representative, respiratory therapist or delivery technician. Finally, you think you have found the right employee with the skills, personality and experience you were looking for. You are ready to present him or her with the opportunity to work for the best home care company in the community. I can assure you that making the offer will be the easy part. Determing whether you really are hiring the right person is another matter.

You should question whether the new employee’s past home care experience will make him or her more successful, or whether you should hire someone with no experience but with tremendous motivation to succeed.

Take my advice: Hire the attitude. Hire the sizzle. Hire the energy. Hire someone who wants to be successful and who desires to grow professionally. Sam Walton often made the comment that you can hire people with the right attitude and teach them to sell, but you cannot give someone with great sales skills the right attitude.

The Performance Appraisal

Once you make the right hiring decision, you must make sure the relationship between you and your employee remains productive and valuable.

Before we discuss how, I think I’d better be honest and explain that I am writing this article for selfish reasons. I wanted to write about something that I don’t think I ever did well, and that I knew was an area where I needed improvement — I wish I had read about some of these strategies 20 years ago. But it’s not too late for you, and I hope this article will help you to take some of the stress away from what can be a difficult task — delivering the often dreaded and stressful performance appraisal.

The end of the year is a great time to complete performance evaluations for all employees. Many companies complete evaluations on the anniversary of employment, although I always recommend moving these evaluations to the end of the year.

No matter when you schedule the evaluation, the key to doing them is to regard them not as a useless and time-wasting task but as a means to increasing productivity.

Completing the evaluation towards the end of the year may help you to think more about your goals and plans for 2004. It may also allow you to determine how your employees can play a meaningful role in the success of your company.

The Meeting is Coming!

Eventually, if you are involved in supervising the work of others, you will be planning a private meeting between you and your hire. This will be a time devoted to reviewing and evaluating work performance. Let’s take a look at what these meetings should involve and how can they be more productive.

First, let’s address the topic of criticism. For criticism to be productive, it must be constructive. With this in mind, learning the art of criticism is a skill all managers should master. You don’t want to be at a loss for the right thing to say or to be ineffective in motivating your home care employee to do the right thing.

Hendrie Weisinger, Ph.D, a psychologist and author of The Power of Positive Criticism, says, “Criticism is about evaluation, and it is through evaluation that we learn and adapt. The problem is that most people get very uncomfortable when they are being evaluated because it sets up conditions of worth. As human beings we all like to feel accepted, and we like the idea of unconditional love in personal relationships. But work is not about unconditional relationships. It is about getting results.”

Weisinger also offers some interesting advice on dealing with criticism: “By denying or avoiding the use of the word, you rob the individual of the opportunity to learn how to deal with criticism and learn to appreciate it. Calling it something else does not make the act of criticizing go away.”

Most of us have already realized that providing criticism and evaluating someone’s performance is not easy, but when handled correctly and in a non-threatening manner, it can be extremely productive.

Why Bother?

Completing a performance evaluation allows the salesperson or customer service representative to learn about his or her own success or failure in that particular position. For instance, if the salesperson is not successful at reaching sales goals, it is time to set the stage for initiating a training plan or additional interventions from a sales coach or manager.

A performance appraisal helps insure company owners and managers that their investment dollars are well spent. The appraisal will let you know if you have hired the right person for the position considering that person’s skills and abilities. It also insures that the work of the sales representative, therapist or delivery technician is on plan with the goals of the company.

If you approach the appraisal as a positive event, you will be able to:

• Increase and enhance communication Setting aside a special time for a face-to-face meeting is important in establishing positive rapport with your employee. Unfortunately, sometimes the performance appraisal is one of the only times you will find yourself sitting alone with an individual member of your staff. Since it often takes between five and seven people to get a piece of equipment delivered, private time with a staff member is a rare event.
• Reinforce good performance Consider this a good time to thank your employees personally for their hard work.
• Develop more effective teamwork The time together helps you build a team, to learn more about your employees and allow each of them to better understand the value of their contributions.
• Continue to improve employee performance The performance appraisal is a time to discuss things that will help improve the employee’s performance. The meeting also provides an opportunity to talk about the ways management can work to insure staff members are able to accomplish what is expected of them.

Preparing for the Meeting

To get ready for the performance appraisal meeting, you should:

• Schedule the performance appraisal a week in advance. This allows everyone involved to prepare an agenda and to think about what they intend to say.
• Allow sufficient time to discuss all aspects of the evaluation, future plans and comments about many of the issues you expect to address. If you are not meeting with your employees frequently, make sure you plan for at least an hour or even longer for this session.
• Be sensitive to the feelings of the employee. Remember, egos are at stake, and everyone has one. Most people believe they are performing to your expectations, so they often are surprised if others do not perceive that to be true.
• Make a list of the employee’s accomplishments before you arrive at the meeting. Begin the meeting by pointing out the employee’s accomplishments and how important these are to your patients, clients and the company. Record how each of these accomplishments affects the company’s value, image, profits, clients and so on. This is a good exercise for both the home care manager and the employee to complete. Each person may have a very different list of accomplishments.
• Keep in mind that the performance appraisal must be a two-way communication. Encourage your staff to clarify their impressions of the company continually, contribute information and help suggest potential solutions for performance problems. Employees should be allowed to add written comments to their performance appraisals.
• Close the session with some mutual agreement. Discuss the employee’s long-term goals and career plans. Develop an agreement about how you will work together to improve the employee’s skills, department, services offered the client and the overall productivity of the organization. It is not only important to set goals together but also to develop a plan to improve performance.

The Evaluation Form

The employee evaluation form should include:

• Name of employee and date of evaluation.
• Time period for which the employee is being evaluated.
• What the evaluation is composed of, i.e., review of the job description, recommendations, previous appraisals.
• A rating system to determine the quality of work performance, preferably number-based to help remove subjectivity from the appraisal process. This makes it easier to evaluate performance and consider changes from previous evaluations.
• An action plan for improving performance.
• Space for the signatures of both the manager and the home care employee, plus the date of the meeting and the plans and actions that were agreed upon.

Appraisal Results

The performance appraisal should be valuable to everyone involved. Results you can expect include the following:

• A clear understanding of what is expected of the employee.
• An understanding of the individual’s personal strengths and weaknesses, as well as his or her success and failure in meeting the goals of the position, the company and the individual’s professional goals.
• A solid sense of the employee’s relationship with his or her manager.

With many home care employees working in small companies, formalized employee evaluations are often neglected. While the process is not easy, even a small company needs to take its business seriously.

While you may feel you know your employees well, you need to set aside the personal relationships and focus on their role and their effectiveness in the business. You have made a significant investment in your people. They deserve your special attention, and their performance will always be important to your bottom line.

If the business is a hobby for you and revenues not particularly important, move on to other issues while you make plans to take your staff to lunch — and never worry about when you are going to return!

Louis Feuer, MA, MSW, is president of Dynamic Seminars & Consulting Inc. and the founder and director of the DSC Teleconference Series, an extensive teleconference training program. He can be reached at www.DynamicSeminars.com or by phone at 954/435-8182.

Look for an employee who:

• Has no problem talking to you about almost anything.
• Takes an active role in the interviewing process.
• Understands the value of community involvement.
• Understands that success is based upon revenues he or she creates.
• Has an attitude and personality people are drawn to.
• Understands the rejection factor and the nature of a competitive marketplace.
• Understands that he or she cannot work alone and that the position requires teamwork.
• Knows that selling, marketing and operations are all elements of the position.
• Knows work hours are not structured and that networking is key to success, taking place at a variety of venues and times.
• Impresses you and other members of the team. Make sure more than one person in your organization has interviewed a potential new employee. You want to make sure they impress more than you!