What is Performance Appraisal?

The Exempt and Administrative Performance Appraisal System (EAPAS) is designed to help you achieve personal excellence and help you contribute to Highline's institutional excellence. An element of a good campus climate is the opportunity for staff to exchange views with their supervisors about job goals and expectations, set mutual plans, and seek professional development opportunities to support work place performance. The EAPAS is a tool to help you have this conversation.

It was developed in 2003 by a committee of five exempt and administrative employees, based on input from across the campus. Prior to this time, we did not have a formal campus-wide performance evaluation or professional development planning process.

The EAPAS is designed to:

• Provide a tool for performance improvement at the unit level.
• Establish a process for institutionalizing individual professional development.
• Strengthen the quality of communication between supervisors and employees.
• Develop campus connections around the services we provide to each other and to our community.

The EAPAS is focused on developing clear, mutually understood job expectations, and for guiding professional development around both your personal goals and the campus Strategic Initiatives.

What it is not

The EAPAS is not a tool for disciplinary action, and it is not designed to determine salary increases. Research and best practices examined by the committee indicate that tools designed for these purposes are not effective as professional and institutional development tools, and vice versa. In addition, the legislative and budget environment in which the college exists does not allow us to guarantee that disciplinary and salary actions would be enforceable with a Performance Appraisal tool.

Performance Appraisal at Highline

EAPAS is a highly flexible tool to promote conversation and planning between you and your supervisor. It will help you structure performance appraisal conversations which you may already be having. It will also help you and your supervisor understand all the different things you do in your job, and give you both a tool for recognizing and prioritizing that work.

EAPAS provides a core set of planning tools, which you and your supervisor are required to complete. It also includes a large (and growing) collection of tools that you can use to help examine issues important to you and your department.

Unlike other performance appraisal tools, it doesn’t apply a standard form on which you or your supervisor will rate your performance on a 1 to 5 scale, and doesn’t create a numeric rating to sum up your performance. The committee that created EAPAS rejected these tools, as they did not effectively represent the dynamic and complex environment at Highline.

Who Does EAPAS?

All exempt and administrative employees at Highline are required to participate in EAPAS.

The system is driven by you, the employee being evaluated. You’ll be responsible for doing the first drafts of the forms, and for making sure each step is completed. You are the most familiar with what your job requires, and with what you have been working on. It also allows you the greatest input on the overall process. The results still must meet the needs of the institution. Both you and your supervisor will be responsible for making sure that your job descriptions, goals, and professional development activities meet your needs and contribute to Highline’s institutional excellence.

EAPAS has four steps:

1. Developing clear expectations about a job – a concise and up-to-date job description and a set of position goals.
   
   
2. Identifying areas of special interest – a set of Development Initiatives on which you and your supervisor agree to concentrate, and Measures of Success to assess those Initiatives.
   
   
3. Conducting a Mid-term Review – a brief checkup of your Job Description and Development Initiatives.
   
   
4. Conducting a Full Evaluation – an in-depth, comprehensive Self and Supervisor Assessment – a complete review of your accomplishments and Development Initiatives. This review is an opportunity to document your successes. It may also identify areas for improvement in your work, and areas which can be incorporated into your next set of Development Initiatives. The Full Evaluation also includes the beginning of your next EAPAS cycle.

The Mid-term Review and Full Evaluation may be most similar to performance appraisals you’ve participated in before. However, some evaluation will occur at each step of the process. It would be difficult to develop your position goals and development initiatives without talking about the work you’ve already been doing. At each step in this process, you’ll be talking about and analyzing the things you do for Highline. Each step is an opportunity to be recognized for the work that you do, and to continuously improve on that.

EAPAS Starts 1 Year After Hire

When you were hired, you had a job description provided. However, it often takes a year in the job to learn how Highline works, and to learn particular details about what is needed for your job. That’s why EAPAS starts one year after you’ve started working at Highline. At that point, you’re ready to begin working with your supervisor to update your job description and to identify Development Initiatives.

If you’ve already been working at Highline for over one year, then your schedule for EAPAS starts during the introductory period for the system.

Eighteen months after you’ve created the Job Description and Development Initiatives, you and your supervisor will work together to complete a Mid-term Review. Eighteen months after the Mid-term Review (three years after you’ve started EAPAS), you and your supervisor will conduct a Full Evaluation, which includes the in-depth Self and Supervisor Assessment. At that time, you’ll also update your Job Description, set new or revised Development Initiatives, and start the cycle again. The full process is illustrated in Figure 1.

>> Figure 1: The EAPAS Cycle

The EAPAS Timeline:

The EAPAS Paper Trail

Forms and samples for the EAPAS are available on this website. Your completed forms from the EAPAS workbook should be copied four times: one for your records, one for your supervisor, one for your next level Administrator, and one for Human Resources to keep on file.

Summary

Remember, EAPAS is a tool for you and your supervisor to talk about job expectations, goals, and professional development plans. EAPAS starts with a concise, up-to-date, and mutually agreed upon job description. The next section of this workbook includes instructions for developing the Job Description and the other materials required for EAPAS, including a record of your Development Initiatives, the Mid-term Review, and the Self and Supervisor Assessment.

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