As water and wastewater utility managers, supervisors, or leaders you want to retain the great people who are currently in their roles and attract wonderful new employees. One of the tools in your toolkit for employee retention is listening and responding to your water and wastewater utility staff. The built-in way to do this is through the performance evaluation process. Whether you do evaluations annually, twice a year, monthly, or weekly – the time that you dedicate to talking and listening to your staff can be the most effective staff retention activity you can do.
AI User and Skeptic
I am one of those people who is skeptical of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. I don’t trust AI to give me accurate information. When I read AI search results, I always double check the information with trusted sources. But I have learned that AI can be a great brainstorming partner or very-rough-draft-writer.
Recently, I used AI to create a question-set for my staff performance reviews. Incorporating AI into my development process helped me end up with well-rounded, person-centered questions that had staff sharing information about their job performance and providing valuable feedback on their overall job satisfaction.
Before Looping in AI
First, I had to think through what I wanted my staff to share with me during this one-on-one. Remember, these reviews are a two-way street. You get to talk with the employees about how they are doing in their role. But you also want to use this time to listen to what is going on from their perspective. The best performance reviews are often the ones where the employee talks more than the supervisor.
During performance reviews I like to think of myself as a detective. So, I ask myself, what are a handful of things that I want to learn from each employee? It might be the same with your staff; it might be individualized. Setting intentional goals for the discussion helps you ask the right questions to get the best answers. Then, your leadership can be informed, and you can take relevant and actionable steps towards acknowledging great work or tackling a challenge.
When faced with a blank page, it’s hard to think of the right questions to get to the information I would like to hear from staff.
That’s where AI can come in! AI is a great blank page buster.
For this year’s performance reviews, I wanted to dive into employee satisfaction. After a few people had left our organization for other jobs, I wanted to make sure the work environment wasn’t a reason people were leaving. Even if you ask in an exit-interview, politeness or wanting to avoid burning bridges might hinder honest answers to the “was there something we could have done to keep you here?” question.
So, detective hat on, I thought about the typical reasons people leave their jobs. Then, I developed my goals for the performance review discussion. I wanted to know the following from my remaining staff (who are wonderful and I don’t want to lose):
- Is the workload overwhelming (this is often a reason good people leave jobs)?
- Does everyone feel like a valuable member of the team?
- Am I leading well?
- Do they like where they are currently or are they wanting to advance?
- Do they need additional training for their current job?
- Are they looking for other jobs?
Looping in AI
Now that I had my purpose, I went to AI. (I don’t even have a subscription; I just use the free no username version.) To get the best out of the AI tool, you want your prompt to be very clear. Don’t let AI tell you what you want, you tell AI what you want. You don’t have to make your prompt eloquent, just use your own words and type out what you want AI to give you. You can even tell it if you want it to be in professional language or more casual language.
For example, for this performance review question-set, my prompt to AI was something like: “I want a question set for a performance review where I find out about employee satisfaction to determine if people like working here. I want to know…” and then I popped in my bullets.
What AI provided was a very polished set of 18 questions in 6 sections, 3 questions per set. Sections were in the areas that I identified in my prompt – “workload and balance,” team and value,” “leadership and support,” etc.
Knowing that if I asked all 18 questions, one performance review would take all day. I asked AI to keep same goals but reduce it to no more than 8 questions. It did so quickly and gave me a set of 8 questions. This seemed more manageable for the meetings I planned on having.
I then looked at the 18 questions and the 8 questions and edited them to a set of 10 questions that I re-worded to fit how our organization talks about our work and in my personal speaking style. The questions were great conversation starters, helped focus the discussion on the staff as individuals and centered their experience and feedback.
Helpful Hint: When developing questions for performance reviews, try not to ask yes or no questions. Ask questions that prompt explanations and examples. This helps your less talkative staff avoid one-word answers. (You can even include “no yes or no questions” in your AI prompt.)
Thank You AI!
AI didn’t replace me in this process. It didn’t even do all the work for me. But it did help me jumpstart my task and I think I ended up with a better question-set than if I hadn’t used this as a tool.
After using these questions with staff, I learned how folks were feeling about their roles and their trajectories at our organization. We dove-tailed conversations into talking about additional training opportunities, shadowing others to support potential promotions, brainstormed ways to create more connection between staff members, etc.
A word of encouragement as we finish up this blog… just try it out. Try some prompts in AI, include your goals, the tone you want, be specific. If you don’t like what it gives you the first time, ask for refinement. Finally, always rewrite it in your own words so it’s easy for you to use and say and reflects your own management style.
In case you were curious here are the 10 questions (Yes, I know I cheated by putting a couple questions inside one question).
What would cause you to look for another job?