Measuring staffing outcomes | Staffing Online Course | Vskills

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Measuring staffing outcomes | Staffing Online Course | Vskills

Measurement may be defined as the process of assigning number to object to represent quantities of an attribute of the objects.

In staffing, measurement is a process used to gather and express information about persons and jobs in numerical form. A common example in which management employs measurement is administer a test to job applicants and evaluate their responses to determine a test score for each of them.

Staffing organization is highly dependent on the availability and use of measures. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to have any type of systematic staffing process that does not use measures and an accompanying measurement process.

Types of Staff Measurements

According to the text “Human Resource Management, Seventh Edition” by Lloyd Byars, many employee performance measurements are subjective, which leaves room for rater error and ethical missteps. Other types of staff measures are objective and based on data such as sales figures or units produced in a given time period. To keep measurements fair and accurate, managers often use a mix of staff measurement types when conducting performance appraisals. If the business is large enough, measurements can be kept ethical and fair by including the input of several supervisors.

Errors in Staff Measurements

Byars states in “Human Resource Management” that managers must be careful not to introduce errors into staff rating because an employee could become promoted or demoted based on untrue or biased information. For example, it could be considered unethical to give an employee a low rating due to personal differences unrelated to the employee’s work performance. Other potentially unethical sources of error include leniency (being overly forgiving when rating), central tendency (rating everyone towards the middle rank), recency (rating based on only the most recent events) and the halo effect (ranking all traits as positive because of one positive trait).

Discrimination

To guard against using staffing measurements as a means of discrimination, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act stipulates that performance appraisal system must be bona fide. According to Dr. Stanley B. Malos of San Jose University, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of the United States was amended in 1991 to include the rights of minorities to undergo performance appraisals under a bona fide measurement system. To be considered bona fide, staff measurements must not show an adverse bias against women, minorities or other protected classes. A performance review showing such prejudice may be considered both unethical and illegal.

Fair Warning

In the legal case “Chamberlain v. Bissel Inc.,” an evaluator gave a staff member (Chamberlain) a poor performance rating, but failed to tell the employee that he would be terminated if he failed to improve upon the points discussed in the performance review. When Chamberlain failed to improve and was subsequently fired, he sued Bissel, Inc. and recovered $61,354 in damages. This case highlights the ethical and legal importance of giving staff fair warning concerning negative performance measurement results.