The question, which of these shoes are the right ones? Chances are you might have said depends, it depends on where I'm going, what I'm doing, perhaps my personal preferences. These shoes are like choosing methods of measuring performance, it depends on what is right for your organization, much like what is right for you for these shoes. After this video, you will be able to identify three methods for measuring results and define various options within each measurement method. As you may recall in the last lesson, we talked about the importance of having Accountabilities in place for your employees, reviewing Goals with them, having Objectives and having Performance Standards in place. In this lesson, we're going to say you also need to have methods for measuring performance in addition to these. Let's look at those. Which option suits your organization? Option one is called the Comparative methods, these methods are where you compare the employee to other employees. We'll give you an example in a moment. Absolute methods, these are where you compare the employee's performance against a preset standard that's in place for everybody with the same attributes measuring. The Results methods measures the employee against preset results that the employee and the supervisor have agreed upon in advance. Let's look at these in detail. Comparative. First one is called Simple because it's simple. You may have seen this before, this is ranking your employees from top to bottom. You'll notice the three employees here are on the podium, one is obviously first place, second place and third place. Everyone knows where they stand, it's how the simple method works. An example of this often is in education where you have class ranking. You see it in sports world, someone's in first place, second place, third place. You may also see it in say, sales organizations, where you have the top performers and they're listed and they're the ones that always get the trip to Hawaii. So that's how the Simple method works, it's ranking top to bottom. Alternating is a little bit different from simple. This is where you take your top performer and then your bottom performer, your second best, your second to the lowest, and keep going till you've separated your employees from top to bottom. This is not a commonly used method, but I have seen it used and personally have used it. If I'm trying to identify top talent or people in the organization then maybe, if there's a downsizing effort, I would look at that, but basically this is one that's used less often. A very common one you may have heard about is the Forced distribution known as the curve. This is where I look at my employees and I will have a percentage at each level that will have to be in there. So I will have to have 10% who exceed expectations, maybe 10% that are unsatisfactory and the rest are distributed throughout the curve through the rest of the distribution. We'll talk about this a little more in a few moments as well. Absolute method, first one of this is Essays, this is merely where I do a written account of your performance over the year In an essay form, nothing more, nothing less. Behavior checklist, these are where I have a various dimensions of behavior that are important to you in the job, my employees. And I will just check on a scale of one to five or one to seven typically where that behavior fell on the checklist. So lets take attendance, if they had good attendance and the scale was one to five, they get a five. If they had poor attendance, they might get a one, if it was average, it would get a three. So, you have a quantifiable method of really looking at each dimension of performance that's important for that individual. Critical incidents, you may not have heard of this one but it's an interesting one. This is where I look at really top performance things that you've done throughout the year, something excellent and then I look at things that didn't go so well, a poor incident of performance. I typically keep these in a file as they say and when I meet regularly with you I'm going to go over those and discuss positively about what a great job you're doing on good performance and subsequently coaching on the things that didn't go so well. So maybe this one is really looking at each end of the scale and focusing the performance discussions on that. The last one is Graphic rating scales, this is similar to a checklist and also has a little bit of critical incidents in it. This is where you have anchors at the end of the scale, excellent performance, poor performance well defined. And then, you have points along that scale that are well defined. And for each dimension you're measuring, you're able to look at that scale and quantify where the employee stands. So again, it's the absolute methods, all these are, of comparing against a preset standard. That's the key to the absolute method, whichever of these you use, it's against a preset standard. Management by Objectives or MBOs is the third method. This is simply where I as your manager will jointly discuss objectives with you and we'll agree upon those. And at the end of the year, we will review your performance and results against those goals, pretty simple method. And let's review in kind, all three methods if we would for a moment. First one we talked about is Comparative, so I will compare the performance of the employee against other employees, comparing one with the other. Absolute method is where I'll compare the performance against a standard that has been preset. Results method is why we'll compare the performance against preset objectives. So there are three distinct different methods and as we said at the beginning of this lesson, each one may have advantages for you, and we will talk about that in the next lesson.
