Performance Management Overview

You and your manager should work together throughout the year to manage your performance and professional development. This means creating an ongoing dialogue with your manager about your performance and how your job expectations link to organizational goals. Performance Management includes components such as setting expectations, monitoring performance, ongoing feedback, performance evaluations, and development planning.

Setting Expectations

Your manager should define and review the expectations of your position with you at least once a year. This may include:

• Your key responsibilities—this involves tasks and technical expectations, as well as conduct and interpersonal expectations
• Your performance indicators—this involves measures of how your key responsibilities will be gauged, such as quality, quantity, timeliness, initiative, or teamwork

Monitoring Performance

Throughout the year, your manager will likely gather information regarding your performance in a systematic manner. This information will assist them in understanding your performance and will be available when drafting your annual performance evaluations.

Ongoing Feedback

Your manager should give you feedback throughout the year and let you know how, why, and when he or she will provide feedback. You may receive feedback in both formal and informal discussions. Your manager should also complete a performance evaluation of you every year, which takes place in the spring for the majority of campus.

Performance Evaluations

Performance evaluations provide employees and supervisors with a comparison of on-the-job performance and established performance-measurement standards. While day-to-day evaluations are usually informal, probationary and annual performance evaluations are more structured and based on specific university guidelines. The performance-management process both ends and begins anew with the annual performance evaluation.  As a best practice, annual evaluations should end with performance planning between you and your manager in which you discuss expectations, performance standards, and objectives or goals for the next year.

Development Planning

Development plans use goals from the performance evaluation and help you and your manager identify opportunities for professional growth. Planning for your development with your manager creates experiences for you that promote skills and knowledge related to your current position and fosters your professional growth. Examples of developmental activities may include:

• On-the-job experience
• Special assignments and projects
• Job shadowing, job sharing, and job rotation
• Research on particular topics
• Conferences, seminars and workshops
• Webinars and online training classes
• In-house training classes
• College courses
• Professional or trade association memberships
• Self-study assignments, such as reading articles, journals, or magazines
• Teaching others what you have learned through any of these methods