Saturday, April 13, 2013

Competent or Not Yet Competent

Next week I'll be doing performance appraisals with my staff.  While it seems to be a rather straight forward process, it is one that I need to work on. 

I enjoy giving my staff praise, but find it difficult to offer constructive criticism.  Well, I really don't find it difficult to offer it, more like difficult to communicate it.  I guess no one likes telling someone that they need to work harder at something or may be doing something wrong.

I also find our performance appraisal system a bit limiting and want to give it more value for my staff.  Most of my staff have been working in their roles for 10 years plus so they don't really have an opportunity to move up the pay scale any higher than what they are - so how then do you make this process a motivating one?!?

Also, the current process is based around job descriptions and is hard to rate.  I also have staff in other branches that I don't work with so have difficulty appraising them.  How do you know how someone is performing if you have never worked with them or witnessed how they work?

So, to make it a bit more interesting this time, I thought I would have a look around for some "core competencies" that library staff should have.

I found some good one's here.

So basically, I took the competencies relevant to the roles my staff performed and created a list of competencies that they can be appraised against. 

The core competencies I chose are: Adaptability; Communication; Customer Service; Organisational Awareness; Personal Responsibility; Problem Solving; Teamwork; Basic Computer Use; Email Skills; Internet Basics; Library Website and Catalogue Basics; Windows Basics; Word Processing Skills; Reference Skills; Readers' Advisory Skills; Technical (Circulation) Skills.

I think these competencies will provide clearer goal posts for my staff to work towards.

Does your organisation use competencies in performance appraisals?

What do you think are your core competencies?