Performance Appraisal Rating Labels: What’s Best, What’s Worst? Part 1
What’s the worst that performance can be? What is the absolute bottom of the barrel?
Would you label performance that is just totally atrocious Unsatisfactory or is it Unacceptable? Is there something even lower on the scale? What about Marginal? Is that better or worse than Needs Improvement? (Sorry — “Stinky” just can’t be used on a corporate performance evaluation form, as accurate as the term may be.)
And what should absolutely terrific performance be labeled? Is Distinguished a better label than Outstanding, or is Superior actually superior?
Whenever a company constructs a new employee performance appraisal system, those questions have to be answered. And there is no issue that provokes more hot debates than the one about the rating labels that should be used on the performance appraisal form for various levels of performance.
So I conducted a national survey of 151 HR executives in public and private organizations across the country. I got 84 usable responses.
I asked them to give me their reactions about the best and the worst designator to be used on a performance appraisal form. For the best or highest level of performance, I gave them three alternatives to choose among: Distinguished, Outstanding, and Superior. For the lowest level of performance, the choices were Unacceptable, Unsatisfactory, and Marginal.
In each case, respondents were asked: “Of the following three descriptions of excellent performance, which term strikes you as the best or highest level? And of these three, which is the worst or lowest level?”
A clear winner among losers
There was no question among the HR execs surveyed about what the best term for the worst performance was. Unacceptable ran away with the vote, with 60 out of 84 respondents—just over 70%—agreeing that performance can’t get any worse than unacceptable. But several respondents cringed in choosing the term unacceptable as the lowest level to put on a performance appraisal form. Karen Watney, a manager with the State of Kansas, put it bluntly: “Unacceptable. That’s really bad. The person should be terminated if their work is unacceptable.”
Unsatisfactory was a distant runner-up in the poor-performance sweepstakes, gathering 21 votes or exactly a quarter of the responses. And Marginal just barely managed to get three votes. When it comes to labeling bad performance, Unacceptable is the clear choice.
But here’s the problem. “Unacceptable” is so bad that it’s likely that no manager would ever use it to describe the performance of anyone other than a corporate Charles Manson. Therefore, my feeling is to save the “unacceptable” term for the narrative, and use Unsatisfactory as the bottom anchor for the appraisal scale.
About the Author
Dick Grote is a management consultant in Dallas, Texas and the author of several books. His most recent book, How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals, was published by the Harvard Business Review Press in July 2011.
