St. Prejudice is a 600-bed tertiary care hospital with a staff of approximately 2,000; it is located in a large southwestern city near five other hospitals, is associated with a medical school, and is a clinical experience site for student nurses and allied health personnel. 

In a recent review of the extremely high personnel turnover rate, the director of personnel, Otto, read all exit interviews from the past year to see if a pattern could be identified in the voluntary terminations. Surprisingly, he found dissatisfaction with performance appraisals reported in approximately 60 percent of the terminations. A sample of statements from the documents follows:

·       "The performance appraisals must have been written to assess salesmen; the questions would provide little information as to whether I'm performing well in my position."

·       "It was a personality-matching game every time I was evaluated. If I thought and acted like my head nurse (and did a little brownnosing), I would get a glowing evaluation."

·       "My chief tech would run through the department at 4:45 pm, grab me and go over my evaluation so she could get it to personnel by the deadline."

·       "The head nurse in the surgical ICU fills out evaluations on all unit nurses. I worked 32 hours per week and was pulled out of the ICU to work in the recovery unit most of the time, but the charge nurses in recovery never had input on my evaluations."

·       "Every supervisor uses and scores the evaluation differently."

·       "I thought my performance evaluation scores were good but later found out that I was on probation!"

·       "Why are they done anyway? We aren't paid any more for a good one."

Otto was horrified and immediately called in his assistant Marcia to share his discovery. She was less surprised than he had been and stated, "Yeah, complaining about evaluations is getting to be right up there with cafeteria food, pay and parking, isn't it?"

To determine whether Marcia's flippant assessment had any validity, Otto requested information about voluntary termination reasons from the personnel directors at the five metropolitan hospitals. The results were as expected: pay, food and parking were the big three, with no mention of performance appraisals at all.

 

Discussion Questions:

1.  What are the responsibilities of the director of personnel, Otto? 

2. What actions should Otto take?

3. What are the responsibilities of the department directors in this situation?

4. What solution can be proposed? 

5. Suggest ways to improve the performance appraisal form.

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

1 Responsibilities of the Director of Personnel Otto Setting and Implementing Policies Otto is responsible for creating personnel policies and procedures that align with the hospitals overall strategy ... View the full answer