Performance evaluations
I handed in our annual budget yesterday and now need to do performance evaluations. To some, I may, being less than 3 weeks into my job, seem inadequate to the task of evaluating my staffs’ performance over the past year, but I look these naysayers in the eye and laugh the rich full-throated laugh of the pointy-haired executive.
And so we’re having performance evaluations. I’m focusing primarily on goals for the next year. I took the canned form from HR and added my own categories. The categories are: personal goals, team goals, technology goals, and community goals. I asked each staff to enter two to three specific things s/he would do in each area to develop personally, to enhance the team, to introduce new technology, and to build community relations. Then I added two other areas, sustainability and diversity, and asked each person to describe one thing s/he would do to to promote these values in our community. I’m interpreting “sustainability” and “diversity” loosely, to include items such as virtualization as a green computing initiative and expanding our range of supported operating systems (go, Fedora!) as a diversity initiative. But we also have more traditional goals too, e.g. printing quotas to reduce waste and community outreach activities in an effort to draw a more diverse group into our profession.
So far, so good. No one’s complained and staff appear enthusiastic.