Interim PDR Working Party Report

The working group on the Performance Development and Review met initially to formulate a response to the documents presented at the last SCG meeting and to further documents supplied by HR in a meeting soon after the SCG. Before we could respond to the documents that we had received HR signalled a decision to move to a trial of a new system in ACES, the Library and HR.  The Director of HR and Robyn Clark presented a new version of the proposed forms and also a new discussion paper outlining the rationale for the proposal and a timeline for implementation of the trial. This documentation was to go on the website so that our group could consult with the wider SCG group about these papers.  It went up on the web yesterday as far as I am aware.
In the meantime the working group met again to discuss the new papers.

The working group has no formal recommendations to make to the SCG at this point in time.  We think that it is really important for the policy around Performance Development and Review to be developed and we are requesting that this be done as soon as possible.  Questions we would like to see clarified in policy include:
How the performance management system ties in with the unsatisfactory performance provisions of the agreement?
How are the people on AWA’s affected by the PDRS?  In particular, how are the people in the upper management of the university performance managed? It would lend weight to transparency arguments if management could be seen to be performance managed by the same system as everyone else.
How many people is a reasonable number to supervise? How are supervisors nominated if the number of direct reports for a particular manager is too large?
What processes will be in place for staff to comment on an unfavourable review?

In terms of the process of the review itself we had many concerns. For example, there is no reflection of the idea of long term planning in the process, it is all centred around short term goals.  We also thought that in the same way that teaching staff should include evaluation of teaching in their performance reviews, managers should include evaluation of managing in their performance reviews, i.e. the managed should get to give some feedback on how their managers are performing as managers. We had other more serious concerns with the behavioural indicators.  Some of the problems that we foresee with trying to measure behaviour include:
- a lack of clarity at the moment about how behaviour is to be assessed. 
- supervisors may not have relevant information to make an assessment
- significant scope for this section of the assessment to be misused. 
This section also raises some questions, including the following:
How does someone document attitudes? What happens if you are rated as unsatisfactory in any of the behavioural indicators? What happens if a staff member meets all of his performance objectives but is found lacking on the behavioural rating? What role does the behaviour measure play in the review process and what is the interplay between behaviour and assessment of outcomes?
We are providing this and other more detailed feedback to HR. At the moment our feedback consists almost entirely of questions.