Elements of Evaluating Team Performance
The pressures of competition, meeting customer needs, and increasing productivity are just a few reasons that organizations approach and accomplish work in a team environment. The development of appropriate and relevant methods for appraising the performance of individuals working in teams and performance of teams as a unit are critical for organizational success. While these methods should focus on the desired behaviors for the team as a whole, it is important to differentiate between behaviors relevant to individual team members and behaviors relevant to team performance.
A successful team-based performance appraisal system will define and use appropriate performance measures and will incorporate useful approaches to assess team performance that include: direct measures of outcomes, multisource assessment and integrated assessments of objectives. Finally, communication is necessary to ensure clear performance expectations.
Successful team performance relies on three critical components in the appraisal process. These components are an absolute must when measuring teams and are not usually considered outside of the team environment. They are:
- Supply an adequate system of information that can be utilized to impact the team’s success. It is difficult to successfully evaluate the team on its level of success when team members do not have all the information to be successful.
- Provide the team with an opportunity to design its own measurement systems to address the contextual factors that impact performance but are beyond their control.
- Combine direct measures of performance and multisource assessment into one an integrated assessment. This will allow the team members to understand and balance the needs of short-range team goals with the needs of long-term strategic goals of the organization.
Considerations to make regarding these areas to produce valid assessment for individual performance from these settings include the following.
- Identification of relevant competencies and the communication of desired behaviors. Behaviors related to self-management, communication, decision-making and collaboration are critical for the development of individual assessment in a team setting.
- Establishing performance criteria that will account for contextual factors that impact team performance and individual performance.
- Establishing a periodic review of evaluations to ensure ratings meet reasonable standards for reliable measurement. In addition, validity should be a part of the review process since conditions and work processes change.
If you’re interested in learning more, check out Performance Appraisal: State of the Art in Practice, by James W. Smither.
– Enrique Washington, Partner and CEO
