March 24, 2011:  An Annual Rite of Spring

Despite the icy morning outside my window, my thoughts, like many other people's, turn to Spring.  Baseball season is right around the corner (although, as a Pirates' fan, I know that around that corner is a dead end). The birds are back and singing, and buds can be seen sprouting.

Across universities and colleges, Spring brings with it an annual dread.  It's not a university's collective fear that one of its students will do something embarrassing on Spring Break.  No, it's the arrival of the annual Evaluation Process (did a chilly gust of wind just blow through here and extinguish my candle?).

Evaluations are a necessary evil. I get that, as do most employees.  The process supports both the employer and the employee as decisions about job security and salary get made for the following fiscal year.  The problem is that no matter how much we tweak them, evaluations, especially in institutions of higher education, come across more like touchy-feely exercises rather than data-driven processes.

Consider many of the usual categories for the self-evaluation (with some generic examples):

Respect -- "Have you treated others with respect throughout the last year?"  

In my experience, employees who consistently treat others with disrespect don't believe they have been disrespectful.  Those who know they do are clearly smart enough, then, to know not to answer this question entirely truthfully.  Those who have occasionally caught themselves treating others disrespectfully, have probably started self-policing themselves because they were horrified to catch themselves doing so.

Integrity -- "Have you performed your duties ethically and with the highest sense of integrity?" 

See above!  Do we really think the person who operates entirely out of self-interest will own up to this on a self-evaluation?  Does that person even have the self-awareness to know how the question should be answered? 

Punctuality -- "Were you consistently and regularly at work every day?"

Yes, I was.  I took two sick days.  If I had taken 5 sick days, would I have to mark myself down?  What about 8 days?  10 days?  13 days?  What about if I had to use Family Medical Leave benefits?  

Inevitably evaluations require an assessment of goal achievements, which for faculty can range from number of publications to average score on student evaluations to committee and community service.  In essence, many of these are simply a march towards an arbitrary number where one feels "safe."

The supervisor who has to read these self-evaluations and respond has a no-less easy job.  There were times I had close to 20 evaluations to get done in a relatively small window from the middle of May to the middle of June (including face to face meetings).  These were exhausting.  Generally, I knew how each of those reports "behaved" regarding these vague qualities.  To address those qualities specifically, especially if the self-evaluation didn't remind me of the specifics, could be an endless review of emails, memos, and meeting minutes. For the life of me, to this day, I still don't know how to respond effectively to the issues of an employee's punctuality.  As with all of these issues, if they were that problematic throughout the year, I should have addressed them then.

So, alas, this year, I'm getting a break from this process.  It puts me in such a good mood that I might even generate a little optimism for the Pittsburgh Pirates.