Question

1. What are some of the reasons that staff may be resistant to or even fearful of evaluation?

2. How could evaluation be made non-threatening or even valued for workers in human service agencies?

3. What is the administration’s role in evaluations?

4. Think of the agency where you currently work, or the one in which you wrote about earlier in the module, when answering the following questions:

How effective is the agency's planning and program design in responding to the needs of the social problems/customer it was intended to address or provide services too?

Does the agency have effective human resources and supervision practices to ensure success to meet the agency's goals?

What are the administrative roles in the agency and how does this affect staff, clients, and the human service agency environment?

Does the agency formally evaluate itself?

Answer 1

• 1.Resistance to evaluation may be an indicator that there is something wrong. Perhaps information is being hidden from the program manager that needs to come to the surface. Or, perhaps the resistance is less insidious and instead arises from fears the program staff may have about their livelihoods. Experienced external evaluators can help incorporate strategies to address internal resistance, whereas a good internal evaluator has a connection with the staff.
• Employees show resistance towards evaluations because managers do not always rate them on objective criteria. Experts call this problem rater bias. When managers include nonperformance factors like race, gender, hair color, etc. into an appraisal, the contaminated appraisal ratings produce fruit of perceived and genuine unfairness in the rating process and its outcomes. Employees react with reduced job satisfaction and turnover.
• For most employees their fear of the performance evaluations stems from being unsure of its purpose.They question what is expected (is my manager expecting me to rate myself high or low?), the criteria that they are evaluated on, and whether they are evaluating themselves accurately (how does this relate to my job and how do I know if I am meeting, exceeding or needing improvement?).
• It also the fear of failure and getting a feedback which is not favourable,leading to the employees thinking they might lose their jobs.Feedback, good or bad, can be as uncomfortable to receive as it is to give.
• The primary goal of performance evaluations should not be evaluating employees, but rather developing employees. One of the reasons employees fear performance evaluations season is because they know that they’re being evaluated and that that evaluation can affect their pay, job title, etc. Performance evaluations should aim to develop people into the best workers they can be. Knowing that the review is for their benefit will take some of the fear out of the process.  
• 2.The evaluation of employee performance is an annual occurrence in nearly all human service agencies.Performance tests can be used to test job related skills of the employees,by asking them to show their competencies related to effective job performance.The use of video or audio tapes of sessions with clients is an example of performance test.
• Traditional trait based rating scales can be used to assess employee on each quality and rate them using a likert scale.Ranking methods can also be used to distinguish among employees when selection needs to be made for compensation or promotion.The main purpose of any method is to promote development of the employee without any bias.
• Due to time constraints only some questions have been answered,remaining questions can be asked as another question,they will be answered thankyou