How Weighting Can Help With Priorities in Performance Management

It’s a common problem. Employees have several goals they know they must accomplish and competencies that need to be demonstrated. But faced with multiple demands for their time and energy, they struggle to prioritize their efforts – everything seems to need to be done at once.

As a manager, you can’t always be available to help sort through competing demands. So how do you set and communicate guiding priorities for your employees?

One effective way is by assigning weights to the various goals and competencies outlined on their employee evaluation forms.

Weighting is a simple tool that helps employees understand what’s important to the organization.  You should be able to assign weights at two levels:

• You can assign weights to the various sections of your form – for example, goals can be worth 60% and competencies 40%.
• You can assign weights to the items within a section – if for example an employee had five goals, the first could be worth 40% while each of the others could be worth 15%.

There are strengths and limitations to weighting that you’ll need to consider. You might want to read our reference article Using Weighting to Prioritize Competencies and Goals to get more insight.

Overall, weighting can be a highly effective talent management tool for communicating organizational or departmental priorities and rewarding those who focus their energies on accomplishing them.

Does your organization use weighting to communicate priorities as part of your performance management processes? How effective do you find it? Do you have any wisdom to share on the subject?