Case Study: The Problem of Untimely Performance Evaluations

You are the manager of a department in a health care organization that has undergone significant closing of units and departments and redeployment of employees to other areas. Several staff members have been redeployed to your department within the past three months. It was your understanding that managers who had employees redeploying to other departments were to complete performance evaluations on the employees they were losing prior to their moving to another department in order to be fair to the employees. During the last accreditation visit from The Joint Commission, your health care organization was cited for lack of timeliness in completing employee performance evaluations. Following that visit, two and a half years ago, Human Resources and all of the system managers were taken to task and told that employee performance evaluations will be completed on time.

In preparation for an anticipated reaccreditation survey visit from The Joint Commission, the Human Resources Department has done an audit of personnel files and determined that four of the five staff members who were redeployed to your department did not have performance evaluations completed by their previous supervisors. Three of those four evaluations are now overdue, and the HR staff is coming to you as the current supervisor to resolve the problem. If those files are requested for review by the surveyors, the lack of timeliness in the completion of those evaluations will reflect poorly on you, as well as on the organization as a whole.

The options that immediately came to mind are that you could:

• Complete a performance evaluation now.

• Have the previous supervisor(s) complete the performance evaluation since the employees have been in your department only for a few months.

By Day 4,post a comprehensive response to the following:

• What did you decide?

• What decision-making model did you use?

• Using that model, how did you arrive at the decision?

• Name one benefit and one challenge to the type of decision-making process you used.

• With whom would you need to communicate in order to implement your decision? How would you communicate your decision? Would the communication be formal or informal?