Trustees debate adopting standardized employee performance-evaluation form

Trustee (Speaker 2) presented a sample performance-evaluation form he found online and suggested the village could adapt it for municipal use. "It's, if you look on top, you can tell where I got it," Speaker 2 said, noting he had modified the form to remove union-language and tailor it for the village.

Trustees and staff discussed key points: perform evaluations annually for permanent employees and at set intervals for probationary employees; include a self-appraisal feature; provide clear definitions for rating categories; and ensure supervisors can add narrative remarks when marking an employee "unsatisfactory." "If you just made this box bigger... and then the same thing was here, but then you can run it there if it was unsatisfactory," Speaker 1 said, urging space for explanatory notes.

Speaker 6 cautioned that evaluation procedures can be a collective-bargaining issue even if the criteria are set by administration; Speaker 5 and others emphasized the form must include baseline instructions and follow-up steps when employees do not meet expectations. Several trustees proposed meeting with department heads to refine the form and asked IT to explore an electronic version that would allow supervisors and employees to type narratives into the record.

Speaker 2 suggested starting with the sample as an interim tool, meeting with department heads to "massage" the form, and returning it for further review at a subsequent meeting. No formal adoption or vote was recorded in the supplied transcript.