For our organization to be successful, all of us need to be able to perform to the best of our abilities. We can do so only if we have adequate feedback and clearly defined goals. Performance plans are an essential tool for accomplishing these tasks. They offer a formal and official way to:

• Recognize accomplishments. Departments might define recognizable accomplishments differently, but it's important to have them in place.
• Guide employee progress. Effective performance appraisals continue to refine the initial job description of what is expected of employees as they learn new skills and gain experience.
• And, improve performance. Whether making good performance better or correcting poor performance, performance appraisals are an important step in identifying the situation and laying out the course for improvement.
  

Performance plans also provide the opportunity to:

• Review how well employees have met job requirements and goals;
• Set new performance goals, including additional responsibilities;
• Identify areas in which performance needs to be improved; and
• Discuss career advancement, including training opportunities and promotion.
  

Some key things to remember

• Understand the importance of measuring job performance and know exactly what is involved in the process;
• Be objective and specific when describing job performance and focus on behavior rather than attitudes or personalities;
• Remember to focus on actual behaviors.  This will help you to use assessment to encourage the behaviors that lead to employee and organizational success and discourage those that lead to poor performance or weaken the organization as a whole;
• Always select appropriate criteria for measuring job performance;
• Keep complete and accurate records of applying job measurements fairly and consistently; and finally
  Make job performance measurement useful and meaningful—to you and your employees.