Tool for Employee Performance Reviews

The Need for More Objective Rating System

Often, I must complete performance reviews on employees. Fortunately, my brief training in Organization Management (OBM) has served me well. I find a particular tool for employee performance reviews to be very useful. I rely on Byron Wine’s guidance to base employee feedback on measurable and observable behaviors that the employee can control. Dr. Wine advises against using a traditional Likert Scale to rate employee performance on a scale where points of the scale are arbitrary. Instead, he described a Behaviorally Anchored Rating System (BARS) in which every behavior is “anchored” to a particular score. This means that each point on the scale clearly defines a behavior in measurable terms. It moves the rater away from grading staff based on poorly defined levels of achievement and makes scoring more clear-cut and precise. For example, we get away from saying, “He does pretty well at arriving on time, so let’s give him a 4 our of 5.” Instead, we can say, “He has had only 1 instance of tardiness, so this is represented by a 4 on the scale.”

My Tool

I created a Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale and use it as my main tool for employee performance reviews. Naturally, I vary it as needed to suit the needs of the company. Some of the key performance areas I cover in this tool that I share on The ABA Exchange are: keeps appointments, timely completion of work, rapport, training, supervision, data-informed treatment, and overall performance. This document was created in Excel format which allows user to personalize and edit the document. You can find it here on The ABA Exchange: https://theabaexchange.com/product/performance-evaluation/

Check out this OBM course: https://abatechnologies.com/continuing-education/essentials-of-organizational-behavior-management

For other great OBM resources: https://www.aubreydaniels.com/