Good job evaluation is not always guarantee against being fired
A new research by Jobat and Profacts among 4.014 employees reveals that most employees have now had their yearly job evaluation for 2009 and that most of them received positive feedback. ”Managers like to give high scores. It keeps the peace and quiet among the employees in the company and it releaves them from following up on employees that are not performing as desired”, says Reginald De Lannoy of Hudson.
Flanders is working. And apparently, Flanders is working hard. Of the 4.014 Flemish employees that were interviewed, 9 out of 10 claim that they have received a positive job evaluation. Most of them – 86% – also say that they had expected such a positive feedback. De Lannoy is a bit surprised by such positive news. “It is important to know that not all managers are trained in conveying a negative message. Often, they prefer to be positive, because a negative evaluation means that they have to put time in helping and guiding underperforming employees or that they have to implement negative consequences.”
Non-critical managers often turn the job evaluation into a useless tool. “Managers who don’t dare to set objectives carry an important responsibility for the fact that job evaluations often don’t reach their goal. Moreover, they are playing a very dangerous game with their employees. A good evaluation provides hope and a false feeling of security. I often meet ex-employees in outplacement that received splendid job evaluations year after year, but who were layed-off anyway. So, don’t think that a good evaluation means you’re not considered when companies are letting employees go” says to De Lannoy.
“On the floor, formal and informal evaluations are often mixed up. The reason is that managers are seldom well-prepared to evaluate their employees. Very few of them are coached in the evaluation process. They are rarely evaluated about the way they evaluate people. This means that they often quickly do an evaluation session in between some other tasks” says De Lannoy.
This rather gloomy analysis by De Lannoy is confirmed by the results of the study. One in five employees says their evaluation session is badly organized and not well prepared. Even more than half of the employees are convinced that the evaluation is nothing more than something the manager feels he has to do out of obligation, rather than as a tool to improve employees’ performances. Among civil servants even two thirds of employees thinks this is the case. On the positive side, about three out of four evaluations are based on standardized documents and are in this way relatively objective.
If you would like to know more about this study, please visit Jobat.