Job categories: Warehouse workers, marketing and website design, and delivery drivers.
Step 1: Job Analysis
Job analysis is a crucial step because it is the foundation of the recruitment and selection process. The manager should ask questions such as “What does the job involve?” Managers can obtain more information from employees through several ways:
- Using surveys completed by the current employees.
- Asking the managers to interview the employees.
- General observation.
It is crucial to involve all stakeholders in the process to ensure accurate information and employee buy-in. Employees know the job better than everyone else. They can help managers capture all relevant duties in a non-biased manner.
Step 2: Develop standards and measurement methods.
On the three job categories mentioned in the first step, it is essential to determine whether employees are meeting the expected standards or not. The purpose of setting standards is to ensure the achievement of departmental goals and objectives and the overall strategy and objectives of the organization.
Rating officials should determine which outcome-performance measures to set critical evaluation standards for the three job categories. Each employee’s performance plan should have clearly defined performance elements. This approach should ensure that the performance plans support the goals of the company. Each performance element should include a quantifiable and results-based metric that targets outcomes such as enhanced quality of service. The objectives set must be achieved at the end of each rating period. If a metric requires the use of past data to determine progress, baseline data must be available.
Groceries for You should consider four overall types of standards:
- Quality: The delivery drivers must ensure the service is according to customer specifications, such as urgency and exact shipping points. The warehouse workers must ensure accurate labeling if necessary and proper packaging to reduce spoilage. The marketing and website design team must ensure potential customers access information with ease.
- Quantity: The managers must set the amount of work for each job category to avoid overworking.
- Timeliness: When and what time of the day should the delivery start or end? How many working hours a day for the marketing team and warehouse workers?
- Cost-effectiveness: All these metrics should focus on reducing operational costs. Cost-effectiveness measures should address specific constraints such as time or money, such as reducing the time it takes to deliver groceries to customers or package customer orders.
Employees must be aware of the standards and understand what good performance is and measure their performance. These can reduce biased performance evaluations. Three performance measurement methods that Groceries for You can use:
Critical Incidents Method
Warehouse workers
How many times did the worker beat the deadline? Did the worker deliver as expected? What were the workers’ attitudes in the job during the performance period? Did the worker take necessary care to prevent spoilage of packages? How well did the worker manage their time to deliver as expected?
Website design and marketing
Does the employee show professionalism in communicating and interacting with customers? Does the employee participate in improving the marketing as a whole? What is the customer’s feedback on the marketing team? What other incidents do you think shape the customer’s perceptions of the Groceries for You as a brand, either positively or negatively? Could there be improvement by the employee?
Delivery drivers
How good or bad is the driver in keeping up with delivery times and customer requirements? How good is the response of customers towards a driver’s services during the performance evaluation period? What other positive or negative incidents did customers report?
Management by Objectives
The managers should set objectives for each job category, give feedback continually after evaluation and reward the performance accordingly.
Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale Form
It can provide an actual description of the performance for each rating. The current performance management system is prone to bias, which threatens the company’s long-term objectives.
Who will perform the appraisal?
Warehouse workers
The managers should be provided with the standards expected of each warehouse worker, coordinate the appraisal process by giving feedback perform a final evaluation using the mentioned criteria. Each employee should be aware of the expectations so that they can perform self-evaluations and improve where necessary.
Delivery drivers
Customers’ feedback is the source of vital information to determine whether the drivers meet expected standards. If the customer feels satisfied by the delivery, they can complete feedback and rate the driver using a rating scale, such as excellent, good, poor, very poor.
The marketing and website design team
The available managers should evaluate performance using the MBO method. Each employee should have a clear understanding of the expected results, such as the number of emails collected, number of customers reached, with which they can assess their performance.
Appraisal Criteria: Results Appraisals
Groceries for You provides products and services to its customers. If done effectively, such an appraisal can give the company greater investment returns. One challenge in the current performance evaluation is subjectivity which results in biased performance evaluations. The results-based measure can provide the uniformity required because it would almost certainly be consistent across all employees. In a given time, we must be able to determine whether the marketing team converted more customers. For the delivery drivers, we can assess the satisfaction rate of customers. For the warehouse workers, it is possible to tell how well they complete assigned tasks in time.
Step 3: Informal Performance Appraisal – Coaching and Disciplining
Because the process should be ongoing, regular feedback on performance is needed. It is possible through coaching and disciplining; Giving praise for a job well done, and taking corrective measures when employees do not meet the expected standards.
The managers should have a file folder for each employee’s actions, either hard copy or electronic. Every time an employee does something very well, such should be reported in the file. Coaching is part of the ongoing process and should involve helping employees succeed by monitoring their performance. During the process, the good should get noted and praised, not just the bad.
If the manager realizes that delivery drivers are experiencing problems meeting the deadlines due to mechanical issues, they would require a needs assessment to determine whether further training is necessary.
Informal coaching and disciplining are required, during which the managers should be making notes of critical incidents to use during the formal review. This step can reduce disagreements over performance in the formal performance appraisal because managers won’t be surprised by what is coming. Managers should adopt the following steps in the progressive discipline process:
- Coaching Note
- Written Warning
- Final Warning
- Decision Day/Suspension
- Separation
Step 4: Prepare for and Conduct the Formal Performance Appraisal.
Assessment
The managers give employees information about job experience, education, and other educational experiences to assess their ability to meet the expected standards. It is the role of the employee to evaluate core competencies necessary for the job and use past evaluations for indications of areas that necessitate improvement. The employee assesses their personal career goals and long-term steps toward achieving those goals. The employee then seeks out career counseling from available sources.
Discussions
Open discussion is necessary between the managers and the employees. The employee and the manager should be willing to discuss the findings of the evaluation. Discussions between the manager and employees may focus on organizational needs, job requirements, strengths, timing, and learning opportunities. Coaching should begin at this stage through open and constructive feedback. The manager and employee should sign a completed individual development plan based on the mutual agreement of the manager.
Implementation
The employee should ensure that any necessary training request forms are ready and report on the completion of items of the development plan. The manager and the employee should meet to review and update the development plan. All employee development needs should get documented.
Overall, the entire process will result in additional costs, such as training costs, the cost of materials and equipment that may need upgrading, the cost of rewards during reinforcement, and the potential cost of replacing fired employees if they do not meet expected standards.
