Your Best Asset: Your People

The success of an organization often lies with whether or not you have the right people in the right roles at the right time.  According to Harvard Business Review, 88% of organizations with more than 100 employees, rely on assessment tools for external hiring.  These assessments can measure competency, work ethic, personality, situational behavior and more recently added - emotional intelligence.  But how often is an employee assessed post hire? 

​Ideally, an employee will continue to grow and move within an organization and therefore the attributes that were assessed at hiring, may not be the attributes that are needed most for the current role being performed. In leadership roles, additional areas of measurement can be based on demonstrating leadership qualities, adherence to an organization’s core values, presentation skills, project management and stakeholder management.

We break down our employee assessment objectives into four categories and review the performance against them twice a year with each employee.

1. Client: objectives that relate to the performance of client activities, regardless of whether it is billable or non-billable
2. Internal: objectives that relate to the performance of company specific activities, typically organizational or internal department support
3. Personal: objectives that relate to what the employee wants to achieve within a project or activity or an area of personal or interpersonal development that the manager desires for the employee
4. Leadership: objectives that relate to an employee’s activities that demonstrate their mastery of our organization’s selected leadership attributes of communication, decision making and judgement, developing self and others, respect and passion

Each category of objectives has a different weight depending on the role of the employee.  For example, a client facing employee has a higher client category weighting in comparison to an internal employee that has a higher internal category weighting.  We believe that there is not a one size fits all approach to performance management, which is why we developed a performance assessment structure that is consistent but adjusts to fit the role of the employee, where they are today.

Ensuring your employees fully understand and agree with the expectations that you have for them as they grow and move within the organization is vital to enabling the overall organization’s success.   With clear objectives, all parts of your organization will be working towards the same goals based on the attributes that matter to your organization and culture.

What process does your organization use to assess an individual’s performance?

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Jennifer Kirby

About the Author

​Jennifer Kirby is the Business Operations Manager for ProcureVision, LLC.  Personnel development and employee engagement are key areas of focus in addition to managing the day-to-day operations of the business. As part of her role in operationalizing ProcureVision’s digital strategy, Jennifer manages knowledge sharing of team expertise and ProcureVision activities with the digital community.