Mark gundacker once worked at an insurance company, where he taught classes on how to conduct performance reviews-without ever being reviewed himself. His boss at the time assumed that managers didn't need pointers, says Gundacker, who knows better. These days, Gundacker plans and oversees performance reviews as global director of human resources for EDAW. The San Francisco-based landscape and environmental design firm has doubled in size over the last five years-it now has 1,700 employees in 35 offices around the world-and continues to grow. For the firm to be effective at recruitment and retention, it needs to maintain its reputation for helping employees achieve their goals, says Gundacker, who joined in 2004. One way to do that is to hold periodic meetings to discuss those goals. Although they're known as performance reviews, the meetings offer opportunities to talk about much more than the past, Gundacker says. And though employees are sometimes nervous about being evaluated, they should emerge from a review psyched about the future.
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