TEAM BUILDING - Why Even Bother with Staff Evaluations? (and what to do instead)

Why do we even bother with “staff evaluations”?  Do they really do any good?  Do we have them because we think we should?  Or have we avoided them because they’re uncomfortable or we feel they won’t help.

If so, the research confirms our suspicions:

1. EVERYBODY HATES THEM - Staff evaluations are uncomfortable for both
   • In business, managers rate performance appraisals as the 2^nd most distasteful task only behind firing an employee
   • Team member tend to remember the negative comments much more than any positive remarks and 95% are dissatisfied with the process.
   • 80% of Millennials say they prefer weekly or daily recognition for their work over formal reviews

2. THEY DON’T FOSTER TEAMWORK - Feedback tends to be vague and goals are often meaningless
   • The ratings are usually seen as arbitrary with 90% rated as inaccurate by employees.
   • They tend to be backward looking rather than forward looking, lacking purpose and clarity
   • Staff goals frequently focus on correcting “problems” rather than fostering improvements or leadership development

3. THEY DON’T WORK - Yearly evaluations have been shown to be ineffective
   • Yearly evaluations tend to focus on negative instances and what happened most recently
   • 69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were better recognized for their good performance throughout the year instead
   • When done yearly, they’ve been shown to have no impact on performance (Adobe study). Who remembers their own New Year’s resolutions anyway?

So, what does work?  What can we do instead to improve staff performance?

Whether on a sports team or in a business, what seems to work is COACHING.  Even the best athletes still have coaches to refine their game. The baseball player has a hitting coach. The NBA player has a shooting coach.

The research that COACHING employees improves performance is conclusive.

1. FREQUENT POSITIVE FEEDBACK IMPROVES PERFORMANCE–

The impact is measurable and significant

• Research (Losada & Heaphy, 2004) shows that the ratio of positive to negative comments impacts team performance with the average ratio for the:
  • Highest performing teams - 5.6 to 1
  • Medium performing teams - 1.9 to 1
  • Low-performing team - 0.36 to 1
• A yearly performance review, usually during salary discussions, has been shown to have no or even negative impact on performance. More frequent coaching sessions yield dramatic improvements.

2. SETTING MEASURABLE SHORT-TERM TARGETS FOSTERS TEAMWORK & JOB PERFORMANCE

• The Aristotle Project at Google found that certain team behaviors enhanced team effectiveness. During our coaching sessions, we can promote teamwork through:
  • Structure and clarity –clearly defining goals and roles
  • Meaning – relaying the significance of the individual’s contribution to the whole
  • Impact – stressing how their personal performance positively impacts the rest of the team
  • Dependability – relying on the employee to achieve team excellence
• Collaboratively create the plan for improvement. The plan should include these points:
  1. Set Goals – determine which specific areas of team behaviors, job performance or leadership development are most appropriate
  2. Create Action plan:  define which steps the employee will take to reach the goal, and what steps you will take to support the effort.
  3. Follow up: Determine the dates and frequency to meet to review progress
  4. Measure Results: What are the means for measuring progress and outcome? Use the coaching assessment forms or some additional specific measure of success
• Manage the plan and consistently follow-up

3. THE PROCESS MUST BE INTRODUCED AND IMPLEMENTED AS A POSITIVE EXPERIENCE
   

• Psychological Safety was the one additional key component of team effectiveness that the Aristotle Project found. Teams flourished in environments in which everyone is safe to voice their opinion and ask judgment-free questions. They failed when everything one says or does is subject to criticism.
• So, for a coaching process to be successful, it must be introduced to the team in such a way that it becomes THEIR process, their means of self-improvement and as a positive experience, an attempt to help the person improve. If it’s seen as a way to micromanage their behavior or presented as method to find fault, then it’s doomed to failure.

The Coaching Process

So, how do we coach our team?

One of the greatest obstacles to developing a team is knowing where to begin.  Some employees require better job training, while others need to improve their interactions with patients. At other times, we’re dealing with interpersonal conflicts, low commitment, or a staff member who just isn’t working out.   Too often, we play “whack a mole”, trying to resolve one problem only to have another one pop up somewhere else.

And even when things are going well, we have this nagging feeling that our team could be so much better.

Managing staff issues piecemeal can only take our team so far.  What we need is a reliable way to identify and address all these individual problems. What we want is a dependable method to encourage the good performance and discourage the poor performance on our team.  And, oh yes, we also hope it doesn’t take up too much of our time.

To be effective, any coaching system we implement must be:

• Regularly scheduled
• Uniformly applied
• Confidential
• Clear in its criteria which is developed by the team
• Involve individual and team coaching opportunities

And coaching is not something we should do only several times a year.  It must be a constant process, finding opportunities to encourage and support better performance every day. 

Continuing with the sports analogy, think of it as “Pre-game” Coaching (daily recognitions before the patients arrive), “In-game” Coaching (immediate recognition and feedback while seeing patients) and frequent formal Coaching Sessions (one-on one coaching several times a year, replacing the traditional performance evaluations).

After trying many different ways to evaluate, coach and encourage staff, here’s a process that worked for us and didn't require a great deal of our time.

1. Pre-game Coaching - Daily Public Recognitions in the Morning Huddle
   • Like most practices, we had a structured Morning Huddle when key information was discussed, and the entire team was able to “get on the same page”.
   • We decided to end our meetings with what we called “Acknowledgements”. Each morning, any staff member or doctor could publicly acknowledge and thank someone else for helping them in a special way the previous day. 
   • These appreciations focused everyone on the little ways that we supported each other all day long. We then left the huddle and began the day always on a positive note.

2. In-game Coaching - Daily Private Recognitions

• These are doctor recognitions & feedback to staff that are expressed immediately or by the end of the day.
• To give positive feedback:
  • Be specific with complements. “I liked the way you handled that difficult patient” rather than “Good job!”
  • Describe the impact or express how it made you feel – “that freed me up to stay on schedule” or “I felt that you made me look good there with his mother”.
  • Be timely – the closer to the event, the greater the impact
  • Keep them private! – to avoid the jealousy of the others.
  • Don’t overdo it – it will come off as insincere
  • End with “thanks”
• To give constructive feedback - Be future focused when suggesting improvements. No one can change the past.  When correcting someone say, “In the future, will you . . . (then be specific on the proper behavior or response)
• For negative feedback (when you highlight behavior that cannot continue) – it must be delivered properly in order to get the improvement you want (See the book “Crucial Accountability” by Patterson, Greeny, et al. for an effective model).

3. Formal Coaching Sessions (3-4 times a year)
   • Even though yearly evaluations don’t work, research shows that as you increase the frequency of coaching sessions, performance increases significantly (3-4 times a year seems optimal) It gives the employee the ability to focus on clear short-term improvements tied to practice goals. We focused on three goals with two objectives, improving JOB performance and “TEAM” performance,
   • We used a “360-degree assessment” in which fellow staff rated the individuals “Team Performance” to give an objective measure of a subjective quality – the employees’ contribution to the team.

Using this format, we were able to:

1. Promote CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENTS in technical skills and job performance (front desk, chairside, financial)

2. Achieve lasting POSITIVE CHANGE IN INTERPERSONAL BEHAVIOR and attitudes (helping each team member become a better teammate)

3. IDENTIFY AND COACH THE STAFF LEADERS in our practice

4. And finally, IDENTIFY THOSE PEOPLE WHO MAY BE WRONG for our practice. The reason may be because either they don’t have what it takes to learn and perform well in their job or they have persistent problems with their behavior.

We all have such high hopes for our team.  Great clinical results delivered by a high-performing team.  But for our team to be great and remain great, we can’t keep doing what we've always been doing and expect a different result. We must accept our role as teacher and coach, implement a coaching process, and encourage and support our team daily to reach that objective.