How to structure performance evaluations in the shop
Evaluation frequency
One of the first things to keep in mind regarding performance evaluations is that they should never be the only time your technicians, foremen, or service writers are getting feedback. Instead, they should always be one part of a manager’s overall communication with their employees, which generally takes place daily.
“My expectation is that the general managers at each of our dealerships are walking their shops daily,” said Victor Cummings, VP of service operations for Rush. “Conversation, observation, and full engagement helps build those relationships with their technicians.”
This way, shops can make performance reviews feel more like a natural bookmark in an employee’s career, instead of a looming, anxiety-provoking event that’s all the more stressful for its rarity—and its potential impact on a technician’s take-home pay, said Beverly Beuermann-King, workplace culture and resiliency speaker and expert at Work Smart Live Smart.
That being said, when exactly evaluations should take place and how often can vary. Stepheni Trunk, an International Navistar service technician at Ascendance Truck Centers, suggested that quarterly reviews could be helpful to help keep employees on track.
At Rush Enterprises, the number of performance evaluations it holds is based on a technician’s level and always involves reviewing an employee’s performance over 90 days, 120 days, six months, and 12 months. For Cummings, specifically as a GM, he focused on a tech’s performance for the previous 90 days, because he found a week or a month-long period did not provide a strong enough baseline.
“Every technician occasionally lands a bad job, they may have a workmanship issue or may be in training or on vacation, and that can affect that month’s performance,” Cummings explained. “But we found over the years that when we consistently look at a 90-day range, we get a very clear picture of our technician’s performance.”
A structured performance
Once you know how frequently you want to hold your formal performance reviews, next you should know how you’re going to conduct them and what areas of a technician’s career you want to focus on.
“For performance evaluations, you need to understand what type of evaluation you are giving,” said Sydney Mayhew, head of Fleet Maintenance at UFP Industries. “[They’ll be] either ‘where you were’ or ‘where are you going,’ and hopefully you can do both in the same conversation.”
Either way, Mayhew emphasized that a manager needs to have strong communication abilities for a review, which can vary based on the size of your fleet. For instance, when Mayhew worked as transportation maintenance area manager, and later as service shop operations manager for Walmart, her team was all on site, which facilitated day-to-day interactions and real-time feedback. This, in turn, gave Mayhew a lot of insight while doing performance evaluations. But at her current position, her entire team is spread all across the country and communicates remotely, which reduced her ability to give feedback in real-time.
“These last few months I had to learn to slow down and really learn about each person on this new team,” Mayhew explained. “I had to learn their work style, their communication style, and I had to change myself to adapt to that.”
But regardless if a fleet is large or small, Beuermann-King recommends that performance evaluations be treated like a conversation.
“I always start with the other person’s perspective,” she said, “Because sometimes there are things that you may not be privy to or that you may not have done enough research on, and you may not know what’s happening in the background.”
Then the review progresses from the employee’s perspective on what is or is not working to the manager’s perspective, what needs to change, and how the employee, with help from their manager, can achieve these changes.
Some questions that Mayhew includes in her reviews include:
- What skill do you feel you developed most this year?
- What is something you have accomplished this year you are most proud of?
- In what areas or skills do you feel you struggle with?
- What are your short-term goals (able to complete in a year or less) and long-term goals (able to complete in 2-5 years)?
The goals question also includes non-negotiable elements such as those on budget, compliance, and safety, as well as ensuring the employees understand which items they can impact and which they can’t. Then, Mayhew sets later meetings to ensure employees are working towards their specific goals or the items she wants them to improve on.
“With the number of projects everyone has going on, it’s easy to jump into those and lose focus,” she noted.
Beuermann-King also noted that performance reviews can include questions such as ‘How likely are you to leave your job?’ and ‘How close to burnout are you?’
“Those last two questions give you a really good picture of how people are being treated and if [the job] is sucking the life energy from them,” she said.
This can be especially important when evaluating leaders in a fleet’s business, whether they’re shop managers or fleet executives.
“Unless you’re the owner of the company, you should be evaluating how people are doing,” Beuermann-King said. “But then if you’re the owner of the company, they should be evaluating you, too.”
This means evaluating if what a company’s leaders are doing is helping to meet the company’s goals and if what they’re doing fits with an organization’s values, she explained. “Really, it’s about how effective you are in the job that you’re doing.”
In the next part of this story, we'll discuss how data can help you understand where to focus your performance evaluations, and how to avoid reviews that leave employees disgruntled instead of inspired.
