Communication between managers and employees is crucial for excellent company performance. It can help reduce the resistance of workers and organize their work, considering both their needs and the objectives of the company. Managers need to send the right message to employees and ensure reliability and trust in the company. Therefore, most companies implement a Performance Management System for better communication inside the team and organizing a proper healthy environment for all workers.
Often, companies apply rating systems to evaluate the employee’s performance and understand their strengths and weaknesses in work and provide training for them if required. However, sometimes the system fails, and workers’ performance assessment could be inaccurate, which can cause a misunderstanding in the team.
When evaluating a customer service worker, several rater errors may occur. It happens because the person who is rating is only focused on one aspect of a worker’s performance, whether it is positive or negative; the grader is too lenient or too strict, evaluating on a higher rate or, on the contrary, too low (Aguinis, 2019). Moreover, sometimes the worker is being assessed based on the first impression rather than continuous work performance, or they are judged based on similarity to the leader (Aguinis, 2019).
If such errors take place, they should be immediately recognized and eliminated because they can create miscommunication between employees and leaders and, thus, decrease the overall company’s performance (Aguinis, 2019). As a result, there would be a drop in overall workers’ job performance.
The alignment of organizational goals with employees’ goals and performance management systems is crucial for adequate overall performance. To achieve it, the company must first analyze its goals, ways to achieve them, and estimate workers’ objectives and their needs (Aguinis, 2019). It is vital to figure out them before implementing the performance management system, so the communication between workers and leaders is well established from the beginning. Otherwise, leaders risk misguiding the team, and, thus, can damage the whole process. It can help well to select the right training program for managers so that all the goals would be achieved with maximum benefit for both employers and employees (Aguinis, 2019).
A performance management system can help in better organization of presentation in the process. Still, it cannot guarantee the alignment of leaders’ objectives with workers’ goals, thus it is risking giving the false evaluation with multiple errors.
For better Management performance, companies practice evaluation of employees’ work presentations. To avoid rater errors, the organization should train their raters so that they can adequately assess the workers’ job performance. Usually, evaluators do not have enough opportunity to learn all the aspects of workers’ job performance thoroughly. Therefore, they make the evaluation based on the possessed knowledge, which leads to rater errors occurring sometimes (Harari & Rudolph, 2017). Companies should provide raters with the training to ensure their proficiency in estimating the progress correctly.
Most of the training practices are focused on examining different errors and reasons for their occurring, and decreasing the possibility of a mistake happening (Harari & Rudolph, 2017). Raters learn how to avoid these errors to make their evaluation adequate with minor faults, and help a worker to present a better performance in the future (Harari & Rudolph, 2017). For example, rater errors in the evaluation of Customer Service usually happen because of customers’ feedback and comments. During the evaluation process of customer service employee’s manager should consider all the aspects of job performance and personal qualities and not base the judgment only on the customer’s feedback.
It is precisely what the primary focus of the Rater Error Training is. To help the rater better operate the evaluation process and make the best assessment based on existing knowledge with minimum disruption; the training is supposed to help the evaluator recognize all the errors and learn how to avoid them in future assessments (Moser et. al., 2016). For example, halo effect error occurs, when the raters are only using one performance to evaluate overall job performance, and strictness is when the evaluator assesses the performance poorly (Moser et. al., 2016). Contrast Effect is the evaluation of a worker based on comparison to others rather than his job performance (Moser et. al., 2016).
The most common errors are First Impression error and Similar-to-me error, when the assessment is concentrated on the one judgment, ignoring the overall performance, and the workers are rated according to similarities with the leaders respectfully (Moser et. al., 2016). The Rater Error Training is meant to teach raters how to avoid these mistakes and get the most appropriate evaluation of work performance (Moser et. al., 2016). This training is basically focused on following the system of standards, even though avoiding any errors, it still does not guarantee that more mistakes that were not detected by the system before will not happen in the future. Therefore, raters will not be trained and could provide false evaluation again later.
While Rater Error Training is mainly focused on minimizing the errors, rather than increasing the evaluation accuracy, Frame-of-Reference Training provides the raising of the rating correctness to a better understanding of employees work performance (Moser et. al., 2016). In this case, evaluators are taught to alter the rater standards to better understand the workers’ overall performance. They are trained not to follow the system blindly, but also to use their own ideas and judgment for achieving the most accurate results (Moser et. al., 2016). It benefits the rating system and can help provide an adequate assessment. However, this system involves too much of the human factor, where evaluators can rate workers not only by evaluating standards, but also using their personal judgment.
It seems, like both of these systems can possibly fail in the evaluation, since Rater Errors Training teaches raters how to detect errors and avoid them; however, it does not help to increase the evaluation accuracy. On the other hand, Frame-of Reference Training is the opposite; it teaches how to achieve higher assessment correctness, but does not explain how to avoid rater errors. Therefore, this paper suggests combining both mentioned rater error training to achieve better results.
In conclusion, Management Performance System can benefit the company in reaching maximum communication between employers and employees. Ensuring trust and good team relationships among all the workers can encourage employees to do more committed work. To provide a better understanding of workers’ job performance, companies should thoroughly assess them. However, to avoid any errors occurring in the process of evaluation, the organizations should provide raters with the proper training, which is supposed to teach them how to avoid certain mistakes and present an adequate evaluation of one’s overall job performance.
References
Aguinis, H. (2019). Performance management. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley et Sons.
Harari, M. B., & Rudolph, C. W. (2017). The effect of rater accountability on performance ratings: A meta-analytic review. Human Resource Management Review, 27(1), 121–133. Web.
Moser, K., Kemter, V., Wachsmann, K., Köver, N. Z., & Soucek, R. (2016). Evaluating rater training with double-pretest one-posttest designs: an analysis of testing effects and the moderating role of rater self-efficacy. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 29(18), 2609–2631. Web.