Weighting Competencies. Yes or No?

Should you weigh your competencies on performance evaluations? That is a question that I cannot answer for your company, because every company comes up with their own processes and protocols for doing performance evaluatons. However, our view on weighting competencies is to not do it and I'll tell you why. Weighting competencies gives your employees the wrong impression when one competency is weighted more than another. For example, if an employee is rated on Strategic Thinking, which is weighted at 40%, but also rated on Teamwork at 10%, then that employee is going to think that Strategic Thinking is much more important than being a good teammate. So, throughout the year this employee may be so focused on Strategic Thinking because how heavily weighted it is that they forget about their other competencies and rate very poorly at their next evaluation. If an employee is rated very low on the lightly weighted competencies then the employee's true performance will not be reflected in the overall rating. Another way to look at this is if that employee were to be rated very low on the lightly weighted competencies then that could become grounds for termination and this is where giving the employee the wrong impression comes in. If they are told that a particular competency isn't that important then why should they worry about performing well for this competency.



We feel that all competencies are of equal value and should be rated that way. We want to make sure that employees take ALL of their competencies seriously and treat ALL as part of their job. When ReviewSNAP was built this was something we thought long and hard about, but in the end we had to stick to what we believed was the most effective and efficient way to give a performance evaluation and we felt that weighted competencies would be counter-productive to that goal.