Formalizing feedback: How to conduct staff performance reviews

Your employees want to know how they're doing. You could just tell them, but a formal rating and evaluation process is better.

By Robert Kazel, AMNews staff. Aug. 25, 2003.

For doctors' employees to know how well they're doing their jobs, somebody has to tell them.

Doctors may think they don't have enough time to do evaluations of workers such as nurses, receptionists, billers and coders. Or they may believe they don't have the management skills to know how to approach the task, or to even set up an evaluation system that an office manager can implement. But practices large and small can benefit by putting at least a basic performance evaluation system in place, experts say. Performance appraisals, when done well, can boost morale, enhance productivity and reduce the danger that unspoken resentments become so bottled up that they reach a boiling point.

Physicians may believe they comment on an employee's performance all the time. But unless an evaluation system is formalized to examine workers' strengths and weaknesses systematically and in a balanced way, workers might construe criticism as simply random abuse and fail to interpret it in a way that leads to change, consultants say.

That lesson came as a jolting realization to John Lutz, office administrator of the Endocrine Group in Albany, N.Y. Shortly after being hired by the practice five years ago, Lutz noticed that one of the medical assistants seemed to act unfriendly toward patients as a matter of course. "She woke up cranky," he recalls. Lutz eventually couldn't take it any longer and made a negative remark to her about her personality. He got an unexpected response.