Lesson for Week 15: Day 1
15.1
Performance reports, sometimes called responsibility reviews, are reports that evaluate the work of something. Theoretically, one could write a performance report on a machine, but the topic for us is the performance of a worker. If you are working in a team, the assignment is to write a performance report for one of your team members. Many of you in the web-based class are not working in teams, so you will have to write a report for yourself. This practice may seem a bit odd, but it is common practice for employees to write "activity reports." So, then, we might say that one of the main distinctions between the genres is this: a performance report and an activity report is that in the first case a supervisor writes about an employee, whereas in the second, the employee writes about herself. Look at the templates linked below and try to figure out what differences this change in authorship creates in the reports.
It is often the case that the supervisor uses the employee's activity report as one source of information when writing the performance report.
Notice first that both reports are evaluations. To evaluate something is to place value on it or try to determine its relative value vis a vis other things. We evaluate things by measuring them. Sometimes we measure things against a standard, sometimes against competitors. Usually we do a little of both.
When a supervisor evaluates a worker in a performance report, she knows what the job description of the worker is--or should know. If she doesn't, perhaps no job description was ever written. That's a problem because performance of a worker needs to be measured against job expectations. Notice in the performance report from Illinois that they try to get around specific job duites by using generic categories like job knowledge, judgment, reliability, quality/quantity of work, interpersonal and communication skills, teamwork/cooperation. They leave room for one job-specific criterion. The responsibility review for office staff at NDSU has specific criteria taken directly from the employee's job description. In the activity report, the categories to report on are specified by the university because these are the areas of job responsibility for faculty at NDSU.
In some cases, people simply fill out the template form, but more often people start with the form's categories and turn the report into a memo. Take a look at the activity report template for NDSU and the performance review template for NDSU to see how the performance review reworks the categories from the activity report into a memo format.
So, the first thing you need to do is figure out what the categories are that will be used for evaluation purposes. These should be tied directly to the job description. If you are writing an activity report for this class, you might measure your work against what you said you wanted to get done when you wrote the first assignment for this course, the email report and the Gantt chart. Another way to think of an acivity report is to think of it as a progress report without the "work scheduled" section. In other words, an activity report describes the work completed, the problems encountered along the way, and the solutions you generated. You want to make a strong impression as someone who is self-directed, punctual, meticulous, and creative. Second, you need to develop a structure or format for your report, working off of some of the examples linked in this lesson. Finally, you need to write the report using evaluative language.
If you are working in a team, meet with team members to assign performance reviews to team members, work out a schedule, and have each member write a performance review for one other member. The person being reviewed should be able to read it, insert comments in a designated section, and sign it.
If you are working alone, write an activity report on yourself based on a set of criteria that you draw from one of the templates above. Or, you might adapt the pattern of Kelsey Ellefson's activity report, which she did for this class. Here is yet another variation of an activity report--one by Chanda Johnson done for this class. Remember lesson 1.2 when you did the Gantt chart and the covering report. I asked you to set goals for yourself in the class (see the assignment at the bottom of that page). If you did, you should now check those goals by reading your covering report. Your activity report should comment on them.
Send me the finished activity or performance report as an email attachment for next time.