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Annual Avg PM+ME Revenue Contribution

MARC FLORIAN, from page 11

within each labor category and can be used to justify reviews and promotions, and to identify and address issues of underperformance. SUMMARY. Clearly, grade-based performance goals such as these shouldn’t be the only metric against which individual performance of professional-technical staff is measured. This example simply demonstrates how general perfor- mance guidelines/expectations can be reliably linked to individual job classifications; and how a comparison of roll- ing averages can aide the justification for promotion, or the grounds for corrective action. However, we as supervisors and leadership also need to remind ourselves that young employees today want to know what they have to do to advance in terms of their careers and in terms of their compensation. There’s little tolerance for ambiguity or the appearance of favoritism or bias commonly associ- ated with subjective performance reviews, and there’s even less with respect to promotions. Therefore, while having a financial-based metric that helps drive performance to- wards what is seen as gainful for a firm’s economic success, doesn’t preclude us from still incorporating less quantita- tive factors into the overall review process. It could very well mark a cultural shift in your salary administration policy; one that promotes the alignment of individual and corporate goals. One where hard-working employees can be rewarded, and habitually underperforming staff (both junior and senior) can be easily identified and corrective actions justified. That said, the effectiveness of using grade-based performance goals such as these depends on their being adopted as policy, such that their implementation can ensure uniform, equitable and measurable standards for benchmarking performance, establishing a pathway for career advancement, and corrective action across an organization. MARC FLORIAN is vice president for Environmental Consulting & Technology, Inc., a professional consulting, engineering, and scientific services organization serving clients and markets throughout the United States and on four continents. He can be reached at mflorian@ectinc. com.

sorted by the individual job classifications or labor catego- ries of their professional-technical staff (e.g., staff types or grade-levels). The annual average PM/ME revenue contribution for this three-year period is then calculated within each labor category. (This can be done for any desired financial metric.) The resulting data are often graphed to illustrate individual staff performance within each labor category (see the graph above). These graphs will typically demonstrate that performance is diverse within individual labor categories (e.g., not everyone performs equally), and that some staff within lower labor categories are out-performing other staff within higher labor categories. (This is not unusual.) Note: ❚ ❚ On average, G26 staff are outperforming G28 staff USING THE DATA TO ESTABLISH PERFORMANCE CRITERIA. Further analy- sis of these data sets can be used to divide the overall performance of each staff type or grade level into any num- ber of intervals, with each interval representing some per- centage of the annual three-year average. Each of the in- tervals can then be assigned a corresponding performance criterion, such as outstanding, commendable, satisfactory, needs improvement, and unsatisfactory. (See example be- low.)

% of Annual 3-Year Average (PM+ME Lbr. Revenue)

Rating

Outstanding: Commendable: Satisfactory:

≥125% ≥110%

≥90% ≥75% ≤75%

Needs Improvement:

Unsatisfactory:

These criteria can then form the desired revenue goal

THE ZWEIG LETTER August 14, 2017, ISSUE 1212

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