Competent or Not Yet Competent

Next week I'll be doing performance appraisals with my staff.  While it seems to be a rather straight forward process, it is one that I need to work on. 

I enjoy giving my staff praise, but find it difficult to offer constructive criticism.  Well, I really don't find it difficult to offer it, more like difficult to communicate it.  I guess no one likes telling someone that they need to work harder at something or may be doing something wrong.

I also find our performance appraisal system a bit limiting and want to give it more value for my staff.  Most of my staff have been working in their roles for 10 years plus so they don't really have an opportunity to move up the pay scale any higher than what they are - so how then do you make this process a motivating one?!?

Also, the current process is based around job descriptions and is hard to rate.  I also have staff in other branches that I don't work with so have difficulty appraising them.  How do you know how someone is performing if you have never worked with them or witnessed how they work?

So, to make it a bit more interesting this time, I thought I would have a look around for some "core competencies" that library staff should have.

I found some good one's here.

So basically, I took the competencies relevant to the roles my staff performed and created a list of competencies that they can be appraised against. 

The core competencies I chose are: Adaptability; Communication; Customer Service; Organisational Awareness; Personal Responsibility; Problem Solving; Teamwork; Basic Computer Use; Email Skills; Internet Basics; Library Website and Catalogue Basics; Windows Basics; Word Processing Skills; Reference Skills; Readers' Advisory Skills; Technical (Circulation) Skills.

I think these competencies will provide clearer goal posts for my staff to work towards.

Does your organisation use competencies in performance appraisals?

What do you think are your core competencies?

Blog June Post 26 - Performance Appraisals and Parent Teacher Interviews

Yesterday I had my performance appraisal.  All was good and there really wasn't anything negative to report - which is a blessing because I work hard at my job and was glad that was noticed and acknowledged.  However, there is always room for improvement so I mentioned to my boss the difficulties I have dealing with staff conflict due to different personalities and also that I like to be liked so it can be hard to be tough on staff when you still want them to like you.  I won't discuss this here because I believe I have discussed this previously.

Yesterday, being Monday and all my libraries are closed on Monday, means it is also catch up day for me.  I make sure I have done all the advertising, newsletter information for school about our upcoming illustrator visit, make sure the roster is up to date, catch up on some professional reading and do some quick shelf tidying.  I had an email about our downloadable eAudio platform I had to answer, so I had to have a bit of a play around with that.  Then emailed the borrower with the issue only to find it is an issue with the iPad app of the platform and since I don't have an iPad I couldn't help her directly so I directed her to the help pages and the vendors help contact form.

Today it is small one's parent teacher interview.  Funnily enough I have only just realised that we don't have her report card yet so am not sure how I will comment on anything other than the fact that she always lets them out late of an afternoon which drives hubby mad.  He says that most of the time the rest of the school is out and he's wondering where she is - he waits for her outside the school grounds.  Then he often has to walk up the classroom to see what is happening.  Excuses rang from the teacher didn't hear the bell to the kids hadn't packed up the classroom yet.

Anyway, back to the interview.  I went to the one and only parent teacher interview that happened last year - yes slack as I thought we would have a follow up one at the end of the year - nope.  And found it good to get the teachers point of view of how our child is going.  It also allowed me to comment on some things like lack of communication about sports events etc.  So I do like attending these just to get that two way feedback happening.

Well #blogjune is almost finished and I think I'll be relieved that I don't have to come up with something to write about everyday.  However, I did see mention on someone's blog yesterday to Library Day in the Life with round 9 due to start in July.  It may happen while I'm at the conference or just after which would make it an excellent time to reflect.