Do you use competencies in Performance Management? If so, how are they used and how do you rate them?
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Yes, we identified role specific competencies based on the necessary skills, knowledge, and abilities for a position and use them as part of our Performance Management system. There are a total of 10 for each role, and they are all equally weighted using the existing rating scale we use for reviews.
I've found that defining these competencies has really helped us better set expectations and communicate to employees the behaviors that reflect company values and are needed to achieve objectives - which has ultimately helped them do their jobs more effectively.
We use competencies in our annual review and other performance management processes (in addition to using for hiring). Every role has a "success profile" with 8-10 competencies. For the annual review, each competency is equally weighted, and each get a rating using the same rating scale we utilize for performance goals. The review will get an overall rating of goals, of success profile and then a total score (goals are 60% and success profile is 40%). We ask our managers to write comments for each competency that is not achieving expectations (if higher or lower). They can write for all of course too.
We do not currently use competencies in Performance Management but we want to move this this system in 2024. We feel that this will further standardize across the company, no matter the role, the expectations for success and reward within our organization. We are looking to use competencies that are universal vs. role specific. For instance, we will align with "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" which is our unofficial handbook - so one competency would be "Be Proactive". Since this is reinforced in our daily work lives because we use the 7 habits so much, bringing this into the Performance Reviews makes sense.
No, I've always shied completely away from competencies. In my experience you can spend an enormous amount of time creating them, and they're never quite good enough - regular wordsmithing becomes a fact of life; and at the end of the day I've never found them to be effective at improving performance. They may passively agree performance, but there are better things to spend your time on imho; and much better/quicker/more agile ways to assess performance.