Performance reviews play a key role in helping to guide employees' performance, compensation and professional development. When you think about it, effective performance reviews should result in helping you to achieve your club management goals by aligning your employee's development and growth with that of your country club. Employees are generally more productive and motivated when they understand how they are contributing to your business. Finally, the performance review process should also enhance communications between the employee and his or her manager.

Important Notes

• Be sure that your review process and systems for measurement of performance treat employees equitably and avoid any statements or actions that can be construed as discriminatory both on a state and federal level. If you have any questions regarding your performance review program and discrimination issues, contact an employment law attorney who knows your state laws.
• Be direct, factual and detail oriented - a performance review can provide documentation for your company in case a termination is necessary. If you provide a very positive review of an employee without detailing the problems, you now have documentation that does not support a decision to terminate. If a lawsuit surrounding the termination occurs, it will be more difficult to defend your company's actions.

Performance Review Benefits
The following is a brief listing of benefits associated with the review process:

• Enables you to confirm that employees have the appropriate skills, attitude and knowledge that are necessary to achieve your business objectives.
• Describes employee's career path as motivation.
• Identifies possible succession-planning opportunities.
• Provides a forum for positive feedback to increase productivity and commitment.
• Creates an opportunity for personnel to raise issues and concerns, and express their point of view about their work.
• Identifies potential under-performance issues early enough to discuss and resolve.
• Reduces absenteeism, as regular communication and feedback with staff is enhanced by the performance review process.

Performance Guidelines and Monitoring Tips
The following are some basic steps to manage employees' performance, which you can incorporate into your performance review:

• Communicate job expectations and responsibilities and document your meeting as to all issues and points covered. Be sure to obtain employee feedback specifically as it relates to any expectation that may be unrealistic.
• Your staffer should clearly understand which tasks are most important, the conduct and results required, and the performance standards against which he or she will be judged.
• Inform employees of the business goals related to the performance of their jobs, i.e., how they will contribute to the goals. Examples include: weekly or monthly sales targets, number of clients to contact for customer service purposes, etc. Decide what you want to measure – for example, the number of sales made by each individual and each team.
• Create a system for measuring performance, i.e., by tracking the number of clients contacted for customer service follow-up.
• Give ongoing feedback to employees and teams to communicate progress. Be sure to compare ongoing performance against job description and goals.

Using the Job Description to Measure Performance
Job descriptions contain many of the functions and criteria by which you can measure performance. When properly developed, job descriptions can provide the manager and team with a clear guide by which performance can be measured.

• Some types of performance can also be measured quantitatively, i.e., number of sales per designated period such as week or month. In this method, productivity is measured by output over a certain period.
• Other performance standards can be more related to quality-oriented standards, such as customer satisfaction. You can measure this aspect of performance by customer surveys.
• Still other standards of performance are more intangible, but can be equally important. These measures include: leadership, organization and initiative.

"Performance Reviews" November 2010 <HR and Benefits Essentials Newsletter> (November 2010)