How Ups Delivers Objective Performance Appraisals

How Ups Delivers Objective Performance Appraisals

Stanford's John Pfeffer conducted research to see if there was any relation between people-centered practices and higher profits and lower employee turnover. He found a very solid connection between the two. This leads me to the question: would Jeffrey Pfeffer be likely to call UPS a people-centered company? My answer would be yes he would likely call UPS a people-centered company. From Jeffrey's research he determined seven people-centered practices. After reading this case on UPS I can see three of the seven practices that relate to UPS. The first one is employee empowerment through decentralization and self managed teams. Instead of upper management (example HR) making evaluating about the drivers, UPS allows the supervisors to do ride-alongs to see the driver's performance. The second practice is reduction of status differences. I say this because the case states that since they implemented the use of PDA's anyone in any office anywhere can log on and see the status of a driver. The third practice is sharing of key information. The introduction of PDA's has made working at UPS a much better place. Supervisors are now able to just plug in the PDA to a PC and get all of the information they need. PDA's are also helpful to supervisors because they can be in the field and still get email and other important information they may need. The other four people-centered practices I feel weren't covered in this case are: protection of job security, rigorous hiring process, compensation linked to performance, and comprehensive training.

Performance appraisals are what companies use to determine the job performance of employees. Here is the next question I would like to focus on. Which one (or what combination) of the performance appraisal techniques discussed in this chapter is UPS using? The performance appraisal technique UPS is using is Critical incidents. Critical incidents are particular cases of menial and exceptional performance is noted by the supervisor when they happen. This is what occurs when a supervisor goes on a ride-alongs. The PDA's used produce checklists that the supervisor will use during an evaluation. The checklist is the same for every supervisor to use throughout the UPS Company. Each and every driver is graded the same way. These checklists are very valuable to the supervisor because it lists all the duties a driver should be doing.

There are always legal problems that a company's HR department could face. One problem they could face is lawsuits that question the legality of the performance appraisal their company uses. How would I rate the legal defensibility of UPS's driver evaluation program? Well after looking at the four criteria a company should look at when it come to appraisals I think UPS would have a good defense in court. It looks like a job analysis was used to create

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