• Frustrated by staff work products that aren?t decision ready?
• Struggling to secure necessary increases in productivity?
• Spending too much time attempting to neutralize acrimony?

?Whatever the dimensions of suboptimal performance in your organization?, says Francie Dalton, President of D.C. based Dalton Alliances, Inc., ?chances are that the absence of explicit performance expectations is a primary cause?.

Performance management and performance reviews can be extremely stressful due to disagreements between supervisor and employee about the quality of work expected and the quality of work submitted. ?Establishing ?Evidence Based Performance Measures? at the beginning of the review period eliminates both ambiguity and emotionalism? says Dalton.

?EBPMs establish quantitative and qualitative measures that make it impossible for the employee not to know what is expected, and how success will be measured? says Dalton. ?Such measures also function to prevent the assessment of employees based on gut feel? she says, ?so the metrics protect both sides of the equation?.

Establishing ?Evidence Based Performance Measures? helps prevent poor performance, facilitates the remediation of poor performance, and provides empirical justification for rewarding or pruning staff. ?EBPMs? also:

• give employees greater control over their performance review;
• eliminate the element of surprise in performance reviews;
• significantly reduce the emotionalism attendant to poor performance;
• establish a clear roadmap to success.