Managing Performance

What I do now:

With such a small staff and with my office located just behind the circ counter, I have a good deal of interaction with staff and can offer daily feedback on situations, etc. Now, how effectively I do this has been called into question after Maggie's presentation today. I think I often see myself as communicating much more clearly than I actually do. I was told when I became Director that I was to conduct employee evaluations once a year. Turned out that the staff had never been evaluated (even though this was a policy the Director was supposed to follow). So, my first attempt at evaluations was not effective at all. Some of my employees had never been through the process and others had been so rigorously evaluated in previous careers that they wished to overboard it. I was overwhelmed to say the least.

What I will do differently:

It had never thought to have frequent evaluations, and I love this idea. I have been looking at rewriting and updating job descriptions and changing the way we are organized as a staff and I think this will help me be much more effective in creating training plans, setting specific goals for employees and the team as a whole, and actually tracking where we are. I think I would like to ask individual staff how they would like to be evaluated and try to adapt my style to communicate most effectively with each person. I would like to do relatively quick quarterly performance evaluations/status updates to see where a person is on reaching their goals, problems or questions they are having, and so on. Of course I will have to continue the formal annual evaluation but I will be reworking the forms and having the staff evaluate themselves not only in the traditional sense but also having them tell me their proudest moments, worst experience and how they think I can help them more.

I would also like to have the board evaluate me differently and provide more comments and specific details rather than some providing a comment or two and others only giving me a numerical rating. Nobody really sits and discusses the evaluations with me. Things have been running so well I think that they have become complacent. That worries me a little, and I would like to know more about what they think of how I am doing.