To judge people on criteria they knew in advance, write the criteria down and hand them to each person before the review period starts, that is, before the season or year the review will cover. For each job on the farm (tractor driver, milker, foreman), you write on one sheet of paper what you will look at, what counts as done and how often you will sit down to review it; when you hand it over, the person signs and dates it. That is the review sheet: the criteria go on it, not the result of the review.
If you already have a written description of each job, the sheet takes one afternoon. If you do not, writing the descriptions comes first and takes longer, because the sheet is built from them. When review time comes, you have it on paper, signed, that the person knew what was expected.
When the criteria live only in your head, a review comes out as a scolding or a pat on the back, depending on the day. The worker never saw what they were being judged on, so the review feels unfair to them. And when you have to decide who stays, who moves up and who goes, you have nothing written beforehand to back your decision. With the criteria handed out first, the review becomes a check of the work against something the person already knew. Without that, the review is your opinion of the person, formed after the fact.
Why does handing out the criteria first change the review?
Because nobody can fairly be judged on criteria they never saw. A review can go wrong even when you are fair and honest, simply because the criteria were never written down anywhere the worker could read them, or hear them read.
Written review criteria work like a goal: with them, the person knows what is expected. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, two psychologists who brought together decades of research on goals in the journal American Psychologist, found that a clear, specific target leads to better performance than urging people to do their best.
The reason is that a do-your-best goal has no external referent: there is nothing outside the person to measure against, so each person decides for themselves what is good enough. A review with no written criteria works the same way, except that the person deciding what is good enough is you, and the answer changes with the day.
The farm workforce program at Cornell University gives similar advice, aimed at day-to-day farm work. Its guidance is about standard operating procedures, or SOPs, the written instructions for how a task should be done. Once you have them, it says, let employees know they are there and that they should be followed, because only then can SOPs be used as a tool in evaluating employee performance. The same advice applies to the review sheet, even if you have no SOPs: the person gets the sheet before the review period begins, not after you have already formed your opinion.
Why should the review follow the job description?
Because the review should judge how the person did the job they were given, not who they are. So what you look at comes straight from the written description of each job: the list of tasks and responsibilities of whoever holds that job. Criteria invented at review time are just your mood written down. Criteria taken from the job description, which the person has seen, are criteria they had a real chance to meet.
Gregorio Billikopf, who wrote Labor Management in Agriculture for the University of California, compares two ways of reviewing people: rating each person against a standard, or rating people against one another. He writes that rating against a standard lets a supervisor judge each person’s work on its own, whatever the rest of the crew did, and that both supervisor and employee have a reference point they can go back to.
The job description is where that reference point comes from. For each responsibility in it, the sheet has a line where you write what counts as done, in a way you can both check. For example: the fence line walked every Monday, with every broken wire noted in the logbook.
Why decide in advance how often you review?
Because criteria with no set review date only get pulled out when something goes wrong. Once the date is set, the review stops being a reaction and becomes an appointment the person can see coming.
Locke and Latham also found that, for a goal to work, people need summary feedback that reveals progress, a regular look at how far they have come. The review date on the sheet is that regular look. On that day you sit down with the person, go through the sheet line by line, and write on a separate page what you saw for each line. This is not the everyday coaching you give between reviews; it is a fixed date both of you knew about in advance.
Why do criteria known in advance feel fair?
Because the person can see that they were judged on the criteria they were handed, not by how you felt that day. And a review the person sees as fair is one they accept, instead of walking away with one more grudge.
Laura Dal Corso and colleagues, researchers who studied how school teachers are reviewed, name clear, rational, and univocal criteria, criteria that can be read only one way, as what makes a review work; the study was of teachers, not farm workers. A review sheet written once and handed to everyone before the review period also helps you judge everyone by the same criteria. A judgment made on the day, with nothing written down, cannot show that.
What goes on the sheet?
Each job gets its own sheet, in three parts with six items in all. At the top, two items: the job, and how often you review it (with the date of the next review). In the middle: one line for each responsibility you will review, taken from the job description, with what counts as done written next to it. At the bottom: the date the person received the sheet, and their signature. With the bottom part filled in, you can show that the person received the criteria; without it, the sheet is just a reminder for yourself.
| Item | What goes there | If it is left blank |
|---|---|---|
| The job | Which job this sheet is for | Nobody can tell whose work the sheet is about |
| What will be reviewed | One line for each responsibility you will look at, taken from the job description | Nobody knows what the review is about, and you end up judging whatever comes to mind that day |
| What counts as done | Next to each line, what the finished work looks like, in a way you can both check | Only your impression decides whether it was done |
| How often | How often you review this job, and the date of the next review | The review will happen only when something goes wrong |
| Handed over on | The date the person received the sheet | You cannot show the criteria existed before the review |
| Signed | The person’s signature, showing they received the criteria for this period | Only your word says they knew the criteria they were judged on |
Keep the review sheet with the job descriptions. You can also have each person sign their own job description when they receive it, as a record that they know what the job involves; if you do, keep those signatures in the same place, and this guide shows how to record them. With these papers together, you can show what each job involves, that the person received it, and what their work will be judged by.
When does the review sheet get misused?
When you treat it as a score instead of as the criteria. On the sheet you write what you will look at and how you will know it was done, never who is good and who is bad. If nobody in a job meets a line on the sheet, that alone does not prove they are failing: it may just as well mean the standard is set wrong. Comparing the work with the sheet, you see where the gap is; working out why is up to you.
Billikopf notes that ratings against a standard do not preclude comparisons between people, and sometimes you need to compare, to decide who moves up. But that is a second step. First, check each person’s work against their own sheet. Only then, if you need to, compare one person with another. The mistake is skipping the first step and going straight to ranking the crew from best to worst: then you are no longer reviewing the work, you are sorting people.
The sheet is not a contract or a legal document. With it you can show one thing: that the person received the criteria on that date. Whether that counts as evidence in a labor dispute, or what the law requires before you can let someone go, depends on your country, so ask your lawyer. What you gain is a fairer review: the person knew the criteria in advance, and can expect you to stick to them, just as you expect the person to meet them.
Where to start
You need one afternoon, the written description of each job, the list of who holds each job (so you know who gets which sheet), and a pen. No software. If you still have to write the job descriptions, do that first; it takes longer than the sheet.
A sheet that is written but never handed over, left in your drawer, does no more than a sheet never written, because criteria only count if the person was given them. On the day someone disputes a review, the question is not whether your standard was fair in theory. It is whether the person could have known it beforehand, and with a sheet they received, signed and dated, you can show that they could. Deciding in advance what you will check, and then checking it, is a habit that pays off in every part of farm management.