Competency-Based Performance Reviews

Competency-Based Review Fundamentals

Even though organizations require different skills from their employees, executives somehow can always identify their best staff members. Top performance puts these workers at the head of the list. Their individual abilities, referred to as “competencies,” provide an appropriate basis for employee appraisals. Evaluating your employees according to the standards they use to do their work makes sense. While some organizations use different terms (success factors, attributes, values, dimensions), they all refer to measurable competencies.

Any given organization can depend upon a long list of competencies, though some items may be unique to particular industries. The 10 most often cited competencies are “achievement-results orientation, initiative, impact and influence, customer service orientation, interpersonal understanding, analytical thinking, conceptual thinking, information seeking and integrity.”

Competency-based reviews evaluate employees’ actual work throughout a specified time period, generally a year. The evaluation examines what employees did and how they did it, using the competencies that you are measuring. The ...