How structured and effective is your Performance Review and Development programme?
Some professions have been pretty slow to grasp on to the importance of Performance Review and Development programmes. Most good veterinary practices are aspiring to perform staff appraisals regularly, but all too often they are swept aside for more pressing matters, like the sudden need to employ a new receptionist or deal with a customer complaint.
I was onto my third full time veterinary surgeon position before anyone gave me an appraisal, which was shortly after I had been asked to conduct appraisals for all of the nurses. Needless to say, I wasn’t at all prepared – so I took myself off to the local college for a spot of training. In the veterinary profession many clinical staff are promoted to leadership roles without appropriate support and training. How can we expect good results when this happens? We are setting our leaders and ouir team up to fail.
Why are Performance Review and Development programmes important?
Your team are your most valuable and most costly asset. Their performance directly affects the performance of your business. Your customer satisfaction is affected by it, as is the effectiveness of your treatments/services. How efficiently and effectively your business is being run, all depends on the performance of your team members.
Your team members also need to be developed. Development within a work place is vital to maintain interest and satisfaction of your employees. In addition, the march of technology means that our team members need to be learning simply to maintain their current role. Also, most people are motivated by career development opportunities within their organisation. In a recent study by AAHA lack of career development was in the top 3 drivers for team members considering leaving their work place. Career development was placed at number 3 in the hierarchy of needs of veterinary practice team members. If this is lacking then they will start to look elsewhere directly affecting your ability to retain staff.
Not only is failure to provide performance and development programmes for your team holding your team members back, will also be holding your business back from being the best it can be.
ReviewHow can you get the most from your performance Review and Development programme?
Structure, training and measuring success.
Ensure you have an organisation wide standard operating procedure (SOP) for your Performance and development review programme. State, how, when and where the meetings should take place, including how they should be instigated and run. If the structure is not built into the daily planning and booked into the diary in advance, the system will become unreliable and fizzle out as the pressures of day-to-day work take over.
Even if the veterinary industry didn’t have a paucity of performance and development reviews – training would be necessary to ensure that you and your team get the most from the endeavour.
Your line managers firstly, need to be trained in how the concept of Performance and Development Reviews and how best to perform them. Do not rely on the fact that they have performed them at another business. You are looking for consistency in your process across your whole team.
In addition, all employees should also receive training. They too should understand the benefits of the process to them, so that they engage fully in order to get the most out of it.
Training-Progress have worked closely with our HR partner Petaurum HR to produce a brace of training modules. One for line managers and one for the whole business team. The modules detail the process, responsibilities and how to get the most out of the process
Measure how you are performing
Look at your team member retention figures – how often are you having to recruit and train new team members. What is your target? Is this improving?
Track that all required meetings are occurring. Then, audit the review documents to ensure they are fully and meaningfully completed.
Audit your Training-Progress comparative line manager reports to ensure the process is driving your internal training programme.
As one of the objectives is to ensure team member retention, measure your team member satisfaction. This can be done internally or you could contract an HR company to do this for you.
Plan your Performance and Development Review Programme
Once everyone understands the process through training, it needs to be planned out.
Our new Performance and development review package includes an SOP, timeline and checklist to ensure all managers know how to plan their meetings appropriately.
Prioritise Performance Review and Development
As with anything that is important to your business, it is important to ringfence the time for the reviews to take place. If you say you are going to do monthly one-to-ones, you need to ensure you do so, or decay will soon set in.
Remember, that monthly one-to-ones are very brief meetings. The importance of which, is to help you to keep in touch with your team members and ensure you are keeping targets on track. As they are done monthly they can be brief, making the end and mid-year reviews considerably shorter too.
Where can you find help for your Performance Review and Development Programme?
- Schedule and track training of your line managers and employees in their Performance and Development Review e-learning guides.
- Accessible storage of Performance and Development Review SOP and checklists.
- Store review documentation in the team members’ paperwork.
- Download the team members’ Training-Progress Appraisal Reports for objective data on whether they are keeping up to date with in-house training, putting themselves forward as a trainer, keeping up to date on assessments and review on Training-Progress.
- Training-Progress Star Awards Reports will tell you if the team member is being recognised for their behaviours and demonstration of business values throughout the year. (CLICK HERE for a Blog about Narrating the positive)
- Use the platform to store and download review forms
- Benefit from a hotlink with a checklist of the annual structure so it is easy to remember and book in advance.
- This Training-Progress package was created with our specialist HR content providers Petaurum HR.
Get in touch
If you are interested in finding out more about our Performance and Development Review Content please contact us on info@Training-Progress.com
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