What's in it for me?
Graham Lewis (gjl@aber.ac.uk) from the Centre for the Development of Staff and Academic Practice on why Staff Developent & Performance Review should be a positive experience.
Staff Development & Performance Review, and under its many other titles, is often viewed as a bit like visiting the dentist once a year; an unpleasant but necessary experience, best done quickly and forgotten. The process is usually seen, by all those involved, as largely a bureaucratic burden.
If either or both managers and employee see it in this light then it certainly is a waste of valuable time. However, it doesn’t have to be that way.
- So why should you, and your manager, take it seriously?
- What exactly is the bottom line and what’s in it for you?
Just what is Staff Development & Performance Review meant to achieve?
Well, Staff Development & Performance Review, right? But what do we mean by performance? Put simply, it’s a chance to look at the tasks and activities that you agreed to perform the previous year and then set the goals for the coming year. However, if it were just that; just ‘are you worth your salt?’, it would tend to focus only on the individual and would generate a defensive atmosphere and not one conducive to honesty and productive action.
Sure, Staff Development & Performance Review is about providing a space to discuss what is going well and what isn’t going so well, but in the broader context of the team, department and university. After all, none of us, work in a vacuum.
Although the title, gives few clues to this, Staff Development & Performance Review is also about your needs.
- What do you need to do make your job easier, more effective and more interesting?
- How often do you struggle with prioritising work?
- How often do you wonder where your career is taking you?
- How often do you feel like a leaf in the wind; not in controlof what you do every day and how you do it?
These are the issues that well applied Staff Development & Performance Review should address. It should enable you to:
- Achieve a common understanding of tasks and duties:
- “Am I doing what I am expected to be doing and am I doing okay?”
- Help you plan your work:
- “What am I going to do next year?”
- Clarify the team objectives and your role in the team:
- “How does my work connect to the work of my colleagues?"
- "How well do we function as a team? How can this be improved?”
- Make the connection between what you and your team do with what the University does.
- Find out what else you could do:
- “How can I learn to do the things I do better and do new things?
- How do I wish to develop and how can my manager help me?”
Of course, Staff Development & Performance Review is also there to help everybody to learn from objectives that have not been met, but not in order to apportion blame. Rather, it is meant to provide a framework for sometimes difficult conversations, so that the outcome is critically constructive and mutually informative.
This is what Staff Development & Performance Review, when everybody understands it and values it, is for.
The University is currently piloting a system of Staff Development & Performance Review for all staff. Over the past few months, seven pilot groups have been exploring how they can tailor a process to best fit both their own local needs and the organisational needs of the University. We will be reviewing the outcomes from these pilots and from 2011/12 all departments are being asked to implement their own schemes.
Staff Development & Performance Review will be as useful as we want it to be. If reviewers see the process as a valuable leadership tool that provides a rare opportunity for joined-up-thinking and reviewees see the process as a rare opportunity to discuss their own needs and aspirations, performance review will more than justify the time we spend on it.
Whatever your role in the University, Staff Development & Performance Review will do something for you and not to you. Make use of it. Don’t be a leaf.
If you have any questions regarding Staff Development & Performance Review or wish to speak to someone regarding career planning, please contact the Centre for the Development of Staff and Academic Practice on cdsap@aber.ac.uk or (01970) 622117.