How can I fairly judge my employees in the home office? Tips from the career counselors

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Home office (symbol picture): It is not easy to assess employees from a distance

Photo: Willie B. Thomas / Getty Images

Hagen, 51, asks: “As the head of German sales for a US pharmaceutical company, I am successfully leading a growing team.

I was always able to judge the performance of my people very well.

Only now, since I hardly see them personally anymore, do I wonder how I should judge the not so obvious, "soft" factors of my top performers, such as their mood management or their role model effect. "

Dear Hagen,

this is a question your CEO and HR manager ask, and one that moves all far-sighted leaders. A topic for which solutions are being sought intensively, because the development is moving towards hybrid work: Your team works partly from home or on the go. It will be the exception that everyone is in the office together. The new era calls for new assessment procedures. »Hard« data, for example from the balanced score card, or key figures from sales, punctuality of results, the quality of online presentations can be easily assessed online. The more demanding the job, the more important the "soft" dimensions are. This is especially true in sales:

• What mood does someone create with customers, team colleagues, interested parties?

  Is it more about confidence, certainty of success, gratitude and trust, all success factors?

  Or do doubts, competition, stress, pressure and uncertainty predominate, causing sales figures to melt?

• Is someone a role model in behavior?

  So successful yourself?

  Ambitious?

  Involved?

  Does someone embody the values ​​of the company in the collaboration and does his or her positive working style carry over to everyone else?

  Does someone find positive words about their own success and that of others?

Top performance comes from positive reflection.

That is why our advice is that you get in touch with each and every individual in your team as impartially and appreciatively as possible.

Stay curious

Do not just rely on your feelings - be careful, it could be a prejudice - but on the process of the conversation.

Stay curious, assume positive intentions.

Listen carefully.

Explore with your counterpart how he or she uses and develops your own work style, ambition and talent and how this affects the team, customers and superiors.

In one-on-one meetings, ask your people these and similar questions:

• What was your greatest success and which of your talents helped you with it?

  How does that affect the mood in the team - did you celebrate?

  Thanked

  As?

• What was the greatest difficulty that you overcame, with which skills did you succeed?

  How did that affect the team?

  What feedback did you get there?

• What positive emotional reactions do you get from others?

• How can you further develop your personal impact?

• How would you describe your personal style of success?

  What are some examples of this?

• What are the effects of your way of working, leading and selling?

  Has a confident mood of success developed in your team?

  How do you get others involved?

If you have to use an in-house assessment system in which you are supposed to enter a value for each and every one of them in predetermined dimensions

such as team spirit, initiative, empathy and others - then you should know that these systems are being put to the test everywhere, because they hold up Reality no longer existed for a long time.

There is no such thing as objectivity

Achieving success today is a complex and continuously changing social and economic process.

Many people, structures, trends and influencing factors are involved in it.

There is no objectivity, especially not in the prognosis: will this expert be successful in the future?

Successes are always unique, individual, interpretable and cannot be represented by a general system of competencies.

We advocate a system that is consistently geared towards developing the individual strengths of those to be assessed.

After all, it is not about the objective mapping of the past, but about steering towards more high performance in the future.

What can you specifically do?

• Give the company management an alternative suggestion as to how you would like to »assess« in the future.

• Stay curious, ask specific questions that give you and your employees the opportunity to speak positively about yourself and your own development.

• If there are evaluation forms: Fill them out to the best of your knowledge, as encouragingly as possible, together with your employees.

Take the system for what it is: an auxiliary construction that will likely soon be out of date.

You remain certain of success.