What is this "merit raise" of which you write? Oh wait, yes, I have heard of this as a thing of legend.
Our agency had a thorough (and expensive, since they hired consultants) redo of our performance evaluation system, and it has its good and bad aspects (evaluating the evaluation is inescapable for a person in my position), but the primary problem is that employees know that the possibility of getting a merit raise is zero regardless of what score they get on their evaluation. This dwarfs any other potential issue with the reviews.
I was part of some laughable "focus groups" on organization morale and other results of a survey conducted by some other agency for a number of different state agencies(laughable as in, they told us that detailed results of survey items were available, so when I asked if we could see them, they said no, that would "limit" our thinking in trying to identify what issues we thought our co-workers had, so we were forced to make stuff up rather than look at what people actually reported *bonk*) and when I said that a problem with the evaluation system was that since managers were instructed that they could only hand out a limited number of top ratings, employees knew that their ratings did not reflect their boss's actual assessment, some managers in my own division were like yep, that's a problem while others were like what? that's not true.
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ninetydegrees
Merit What?
on 2007-05-11 02:17 pm (UTC)What is this "merit raise" of which you write? Oh wait, yes, I have heard of this as a thing of legend.
Our agency had a thorough (and expensive, since they hired consultants) redo of our performance evaluation system, and it has its good and bad aspects (evaluating the evaluation is inescapable for a person in my position), but the primary problem is that employees know that the possibility of getting a merit raise is zero regardless of what score they get on their evaluation. This dwarfs any other potential issue with the reviews.
I was part of some laughable "focus groups" on organization morale and other results of a survey conducted by some other agency for a number of different state agencies(laughable as in, they told us that detailed results of survey items were available, so when I asked if we could see them, they said no, that would "limit" our thinking in trying to identify what issues we thought our co-workers had, so we were forced to make stuff up rather than look at what people actually reported *bonk*) and when I said that a problem with the evaluation system was that since managers were instructed that they could only hand out a limited number of top ratings, employees knew that their ratings did not reflect their boss's actual assessment, some managers in my own division were like yep, that's a problem while others were like what? that's not true.