Key data to use in performance reviews

This is Part Three of a three-part story. Click here to see Part One and Part Two.

In this story, you'll learn:

How to use technician metrics effectively during reviews
How to approach performance evaluations as a discussion instead of a scolding

Performance evaluations aren't just a tool for shop managers and foremen to have a better understanding of their employees' aspirations and career goals. In fact, their primary goal is to allow for formal communication and feedback on where employees are excelling, where they need improvement, and how managers can assist them with the latter. Oftentimes, this means having a productive conversation between a shop manager and a technician, with both discussing areas where they feel the technician is excelling, what needs more work, and their efforts in the context of the shop.

Of course, while having a conversation with your employee is all well and good, many shops also have another resource at their disposal for their reviews: Cold, hard data. From technician efficiency and productivity metrics to vehicle data and comeback numbers, shops are rife with numbers that can be applied to technician evaluations.

As for how those numbers can be applied, when Victor Cummings, VP of service operations for Rush Enterprises was a regional GM, he helped clean up a shop that was struggling with inconsistent tech pay, high turnover, and no process to measure performance at all.

“I collaborated with the techs and the service team to develop a very rudimentary performance calculator,” Cummings recalled. “We called it the Tech Pay calculator, and that allowed us to evaluate our technicians’ training and their performance in terms of proficiency, which referred to hours billed versus hours worked.”

Later, Rush Enterprises’ previous COO, Mike McRoberts, worked with Cummings and his team to refine that system into the Tech Pro performance review they use today. The Tech Pro process looks at a technician’s overall performance, including their skill assessments, training, competencies, hours billed per day, and revenue per day.

“The revenue per day has a lot more to do with proficiency,” Cummings explained. “And it’s really a good guideline for our managers to begin to understand where the deficiencies are; it would point them in the right direction in terms of what questions to ask to truly understand where there are performance issues.”

And at Rush, technicians aren’t the only ones who can be evaluated numerically.

“My personal performance evaluation is based on the overall performance of the service departments in our dealership network and where we’re going,” Cummings said. “If we have high turnover, for example, that is as much my responsibility as it is that of our dealership managers.”

That means that leaders at Rush Enterprises may be evaluated using dashboards that provide aggregate performance metrics by division, location, department, or employee.

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Things to avoid

So, once a manager knows how often they’re providing their evaluations, what kinds of questions they want to include, and have the data to back up their points, now comes the evaluation itself. While it might be tempting to present a technician with a list of their failings that you’d like them to change and then call it a day, Beverly Beuermann-King, workplace culture and resiliency speaker and expert at Work Smart Live Smart, emphasized that that’s not all a performance review should accomplish and that managers should never underestimate the power of their tone.

“[Performance evaluations] should never be this finger-wag kind of thing,” she said. “Otherwise, you’ve completely demotivated that person, even if there are good things happening.”

Part of keeping a manager’s tone constructive means showing your technicians respect and appreciation throughout the process, even when you’re trying to tell them how they should improve. If a technician leaves a review feeling denigrated instead of evaluated and supported, they may remember that feeling instead of what they needed to do to work on.

This happened to Stepheni Trunk, an International Navistar service technician at Ascendance Truck Centers, after she finished her first review. The technician had an illness that took her out of commission for four months. This impacted her annual metrics, and she felt being sick was held against her, while her progress, especially as a younger tech in the shop, was ignored.

“When I started at International, I could only do PMs, and now, I’m in the middle of replacing NOx sensors on an X15 engine,” Trunk stated. “With this service review, they’re telling me things I already know, while also insulting how hard I’ve been working for the past two years. It’s discouraging because nothing that they said was able to help me continue with a good idea of where to look for direction.”

JR Hartz, a medium-duty technician for Rush based in Denver, Colorado, tries to avoid this kind of result with the technicians he mentors by providing perspective during evaluations. This means understanding that even if their numbers don’t reflect where they want to be, they can’t take them as a sign that they’re failing. Instead, they need to consider that if they’re tackling new projects and processes, they might not make time on those items for this evaluation, but strengthen their skills for the next one.

Jeremy “JJ” Jolly, a mobile technician for Rush from Tyler, Texas, also tries to make sure his managers keep a certain amount of perspective during his evaluations. As a mobile tech who has to contend with hours of drive time and 24/7 availability, Jolly’s efficiency numbers might not be the same as a shop technician’s, but that doesn’t mean he’s not putting in the work.

This is also partially why performance evaluations should never be stand-alone events in a shop or fleet. After all, Trunk noted that while her performance evaluation left her feeling frustrated and undervalued, the conversations she has had with her boss for the rest of the year have been more open and constructive.

“I am able to have private and open conversations with my boss, and I’m allowed to ask him things like, ‘Is there more that I can be doing? What can I be doing that would make me a better technician for you?’” Trunk stated. “And he will answer honestly, and he will give it to me straight. He does acknowledge when we change our behaviors and make improvements.”

These are the kinds of insights Trunk said she wished had been more present in her yearly review. Because while evaluations are important to helping fleet employees get stronger, no matter their job, that strength shouldn’t come at the cost of recognizing the good work technicians are doing.

“A lot of people are here because they like what they do, and that should be appreciated a little bit more because there’s not a lot of people who want to do this job,” Trunk concluded. “Companies all around should do a better job at celebrating their technicians and showing them that they value them.”