3.3.3 Training to Minimize Manager Bias In the Rating Process

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From the course by University of Minnesota

Managing Employee Performance

475 ratings

University of Minnesota

Managing Employee Performance

475 ratings

Course 3 of 5 in the Specialization Human Resource Management: HR for People Managers

Once you have hired good employees, the next step that successful people managers take is to develop the full potential of their employees. Performance management is a process that helps managers achieve the goal of getting the best from their employees. In this third course in the Human Resources for People Managers specialization, we will discuss the skills and key processes you will need to develop your employees to attain department and organizational goals. These skills will include setting clear expectations, providing positive and corrective feedback, and delivering an effective performance appraisal.

From the lesson

TOOLS FOR EFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

In this module, you will learn the fundamentals of performance reviews. You will learn the steps for conducting an effective performance review, timing and frequency, and how to create individual development plans for your employees. Another key element in this module is feedback; You will learn the components of effective feedback, the advantages and disadvantages of multirater feedback, and why giving feedback is so important. Finally, you'll learn ways to avoid rater bias and elements for best practice in performance reviews.

3.3.1 Identifying Types of General Rating Errors7:47

3.3.2 Rating Errors and Practical Impact5:29

3.3.3 Training to Minimize Manager Bias In the Rating Process4:59

3.3.4 Best Practices to Minimize Legal Exposure4:29

Meet the Instructors

Larry Bourgerie
Senior Lecturer
Carlson School of Management, Department of Work and Organizations

No matter how hard we try as managers, we will make errors, it's only human nature.

To combat them, good training will help minimize the errors.

So I recommend that when you're doing performance management programs,

either internally you develop a program, or

externally find one that will help on rater error training.

After this video, you'll be able to understand the content for

a rater training program.

So let's look at what these might look like.

The content of a good training program for raters are as follows.

One, you should explain how the system works.

This gets by on commitment.

People need the big picture on the whole performance management process and

appraisal systems so they have an objective view of the big picture.

Training on just pieces here and there does not work.

Big picture first.

Second, they need to understand what motivations are for distortions.

We've talked about these, and why people actually distort.

That understanding leads to greater insight, which will lead to

less likely to have distortions of their own now that they know they exist.

Knowledge is a wonderful thing to learn and grow from.

Skill building on identifying, observing, recording and evaluating.

This is a crucial part.

We want people to be able to actually practice this process.

Performance management is much too important of a process to help grow

our individuals, our teams,

our organizations to just have it be a 30 minute coaching session.

You really want to have your managers have skills at evaluating.

This is one of the most important parts of their job is to evaluate their people.

If it's filled with errors, we're not doing a very good job.

Next, how do you interact with employees when they receive performance information?

You may wonder what this has to do with it.

The reason we want to have the training and interaction with employees.

We've talked about we shy away from feedback on occasion

because it's difficult.

If we can train our managers how to have that difficult conversation,

and how to get feedback throughout the year,

they're more likely to have an easy time with the conversation.

This part is crucial.

The more we get used to having feedback, the easier.

I think of students, when students come to me.

I've had training in this, obviously.

And when they come to me I basically tell them

why the performance is rated that way.

Give them the facts and the data.

And I've done this with employees as well.

And they tend to be pretty satisfied once faced with the facts.

You can defuse that situation.

This is the really important part of the training.

Let's talk about a couple specific components that some of the common ones

have on rater training programs.

One is just general rater error training as a whole.

We've talked about in the past a number of different types of rater errors.

Each of those can be minimized with good training.

When we talked about the recency effect, for example.

Having insight that this occurs will help managers look at the whole year's data.

We talked about just general biases, having examined their own biases.

This is the types of things you'll do in a rater error training program.

Then there's frame of reference training.

If you've heard of the term, behavior modeling, this is where you really,

really get some intense training on how to do good reviews.

You'll have someone walk you through the steps,

you'll observe them, you'll take notes, you'll see videos, you'll practice.

This is a pretty intense program on how to really develop the frame of reference,

and knowing how to give good reviews.

Behavioral observation, it's sort of like frame of reference where you get practice

at observing behaviors on different skill dimensions.

And you'll be able to see what is good, what is bad and sort of have,

again, a frame of reference, if you will, for future reviews.

And the last one I like is, and

this is can be a smaller one done with your own teams, calibration training.

This is where we really decide what's good and what's bad, and

that we're all seeing off the same page.

I mentioned earlier that I often have oversight from an HR

perspective to make sure the reviews are consistent.

Calibration training will help eliminate inconsistencies between departments and

managers by having everybody understand what is effective, what's ineffective.

So with these types of programs, you can minimize many of the errors,

and both have a better review process, and

help from a legal perspective that you're giving good reviews to all your people.

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