MANAGER'S MEMO

December rings in a season of celebration—as well as reflection upon our accomplishments and failures for the past year. At my company, we’re busy preparing the next annual budget, part of which addresses employee costs. With this comes the obligation of conducting employee evaluations. If you’re fortunate enough to work for a business that values performance, perhaps you’re the one up for review.

An evaluation can mean different things at different companies. For some, it’s a time to sit with a supervisor and discuss your job effectiveness, from your perspective and theirs. Often, you’ll both be on the same page. However, you may not feel your review accurately portrays your performance. Let’s review a few tips to make this process better for you (and the boss).

First, I suggest you both set some common goals. For example, let’s assume you’re a manager waiving an average of five late fees per month. Although your supervisor accepts this, you’re costing the company $50 per month or $600 a year.

Perhaps you and the boss agree to reduce this by one-half, to $300 per year. “If you accomplish this,” he says, “maybe you’ll earn a bonus of 50 percent of what you accrue for the company.” Achieve this goal and at year’s end, you’re in a position to discuss how your performance benefited the company and how you’re entitled to that bonus.

Although this is a simplified example, the important point is to outline goals that are mutually beneficial to you and your company. If you make the business more money, you should receive the financial benefits, which boils down to a win-win proposition for everyone.

Another area to critique is your day-to-day work load. How do you effectively evaluate your performance on those tasks? First off, unless you’re working with a supervisor that has actually done your job, it may be hard for him to understand the tasks at hand. Lots of people who’ve never held the position perceive a self-storage manager’s job as easy: You collect some rent payments, show some units to prospective customers, sweep out a few units, pull a few weeds, shuffle some paper in the office and, most of the time, just sit back and relax. Right?

The Truth of the Matter

If you’ve been in the trenches for a long time, you know better. This job requires you to wear many hats:

• Counselor 
• Collections agent 
• Maintenance person 
• Marketing expert 
• Sales person 
• Bookkeeper 
• Customer-service representative 
• Security guard 
• Detective 

I’m sure the list could go on and on. With all these responsibilities, it’s next to impossible to conduct an effective performance evaluation. Going back to our example above, a good way to set up your own performance evaluation is to set the criteria. Both you and your supervisor should agree on performance expectations such as a clean site, daily lock checks, deposits made on timely basis, reporting accuracy, etc. Once you’ve agreed on those, it becomes easier to evaluate how well the tasks have been accomplished.

But how do you set goals for occupancy rates, delinquency rates, funds collected and even for savings on expenses? Again, using a target system allows you to measure accomplishments at year’s end. Simply setting the objective of increased occupancy is easy; the hard part is determining how managers can reach it and what the responsibilities of the owners and supervisors will be.

If a manager works hard to get every customer to the store, it’s only fair the owner gives him tools to help. Does your facility have an adequate ad in the local Yellow Pages? What about electronic Yellow Pages exposure? Is there a website the owner is promoting? Do you do direct mail? Do you have sales brochures for your store? Is your signage adequate for your location?

These are the type of questions you and your supervisor can discuss to determine if you’re adequately outfitted to improve operations at your site.

We like to go over performance reviews at the same time we’re in the budget process. If you’re not invited into budgeting sessions, inquire with your supervisor about the chances of inclusion. Explain to him you’d like to see firsthand what’s spent in advertising and marketing dollars to draw new customers to the store. The lesson helps to instill a sense of responsibility in managers. Plus, it prompts them to reflect on how they can contribute to the bottom line—through marketing and advertising—as well as receive paybacks for a job well done.

Evaluations are hard enough. Make the process easier by establishing performance-related goals with your boss, and hopefully he’ll see the value of offering you incentives to achieve them.