Dump The Form To: The Zenith City Personnel Director From: Bob Behn Re: Firing Incompetent Employees Date: December, 1998 Get rid of the annual performance evaluation. It accomplishes nothing. It only makes it impossible for the city to fire even the most flagrant miscreant. THE PROBLEM So Zenith City has Alfred Bell and a few other poor performers. Big deal. Their failure or inability to perform is a small loss compared to the excellent work that all the talented and dedicated employees do. Unfortunately, those few egregiously incompetent employees undermine the moral of all the conscientious people. Government reformers give a lot of attention to the need to improve the morale of outstanding employees by rewarding them financially for their performance. But the city's failure to fire incompetent employees is a even bigger drag on morale. The good employee sees that uncooperative colleague every day. Thus, every day, the good employee is reminded that the city treats both of them precisely the same. If you really want to improve morale, if you really want to show the city's good performers that their work is appreciated, if you really want to help line managers improve performance, don't focus on getting a some small performance bonuses for the very top performers. Instead, spend your time helping line managers get rid of their worst employees. Of course, it's never going to be easy to fire anybody. Employees targeted for termination have plenty of ways to delay the process or even overturn an effort to fire them. Still, there is one thing you can do to give line managers to a chance to get rid of their incompetent, malicious goof-offs: Get rid of the annual performance-evaluation form. TRYING TO FIX THE ANNUAL PERFORMANCE EVALUATIONS The annual performance evaluations serve no purpose — no purpose, except to protect poor performers from dismissal. No one uses them. They are simply the bureaucratic legacy of someone with a simple-minded theory about personnel management: If supervisors are forced to evaluate their subordinates, formally and periodically, everyone will automatically get some accurate, helpful, motivating feedback about expectations, performance and how to improve. Unfortunately, this theory has proven not to work in practice. Formal, periodic performance evaluations simply do not accomplish the purposes for which they were designed — not in Zenith City, not anywhere. If the evaluation forms could actually help managers improve performance, they would use them. I'll bet the mayor's office doesn't use the forms. Of course, it might be possible to create an evaluation form that managers would find useful. That is, they would discover that the form helped them improve their unit's performance. But I doubt it. If such a form existed, it long ago would have proven its effectiveness and swept the globe. Instead, regardless of the specifics of the personnel-evaluation form, public (and private) managers do not use them. They may fill them out, but they don't use them. It's not that your performance-evaluation form is broken. Performance-evaluation forms simply don't work. TRYING TO FIX THE CITY'S MANAGERS The problem might be the city's managers and supervisors who refuse to use the form. The problem might be that they are undercutting an effective system. But if the system is so damn effective, why haven't a few supervisors figured out how to exploit this effectiveness? Maybe the personnel department has failed to explain — carefully and clearly — how to use the forms to improve performance. But I doubt with any instruction booklet or training seminar will convince the city's managers to use the form. The hypothesis that performance evaluation forms cannot be used to improve performance is supported by some powerful evidence: None of the line managers in Zenith City have figured out how to use them to accomplish this (or any other constructive) purpose. ELIMINATING THE PERFORMANCE EVALUATION FORMS In fact, the most significant impact of the performance-evaluation forms is decidedly pernicious: The only time the forms come into play is when an employee is threatened with dismissal. And then the forms are used not to make the case against an incompetent employee but to undermine that case. Your department could berate Zenith City's managers and supervisors for failing to rate employees accurately. You might even devise mechanisms to force them to place a percentage of their staff in the does-not-meet-expectations category. (Such a requirement, however, penalizes those effective managers who manage creatively, treat employees well, establish a reputation for their unit as a good place to work, and thus attract outstanding employees. Should the personnel department encourage managers to hire a few poor performers just so that they will have the requisite percentage of employees to rate as "does not meet expectations"?) But you can't force managers and supervisors to use the forms to improve performance any more than you can force them to use whips to improve performance. Managers don't use whips because they don't work, and they don't use performance forms for the same reason. Accept the inevitable: If you force managers to fill out a performance-evaluation form for every employee, they will rarely check the box labeled "does not meet expectations." Doing so causes them more problems that it solves. Eliminating the annual performance evaluation won't automatically eliminate incompetent employees. It is only a start. Nevertheless, until Zenith City does get rid of the annual evaluation form, it won't be able to start getting rid of its few annoyingly poor performers. Agree or disagree? If you think you have a better way to deal with this month's Manager's Choice dilemma, or would like to expand on Bob Behn's approach, share your thoughts with other readers here. Send your solution to mailbox@governing.com. Please include your name, location, government or business title or job description, and a daytime phone number (for verification purposes). To see responses posted by other readers, click here. Manager's Choice | Governing home page Copyright © 1998, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing and City & State are registered trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc.