How to Work with TIP

Let’s take a moment to think about the main tasks you’ll be doing with TIP.

A key principle of TIP is: no evaluation without description.  That is, you can’t evaluate an employee until you’ve written a job description for that employee.

That’s not as restrictive as it sounds, because you can make a job description out of a previously existing evaluation.  You can also continue to modify the job description as you evaluate the employee. 

Job descriptions and employee evaluations are files whose names end in “.tip-d” (description) and “.tip-v” (evaluation) respectively.  Depending on how your computer is set up, you may or may not see these endings on the file names.  But you will certainly see blue and green TIP icons for the files, like these:

But right now it’s your first day using TIP.  You don’t have any files yet.  How do you proceed?

To Make a Job Description:

  • You can use a job description from TIP’s library.  TIP comes with a library of job descriptions that you can customize to fit your needs.
  • You can make a job description from scratch.  In this case TIP supplies a template – that is, TIP fills in some items that fit many (not all!) management jobs tolerably well.  This is just to get you started thinking.  Your task is to work through the whole job description and make it fit your needs.
  • You can use one that your organization already has.  What you need may already be on hand.  You can edit any job description to make changes, then save it under another name.
  • You can even extract a job description from an employee evaluation that is already on hand.  Remember, every evaluation has a complete job description inside it.

To Evaluate an Employee:

  • First you need either a job description, or a previous employee evaluation for the same job (with the same or a different employee).  From one or the other, you can make a new evaluation.
  • Then, you’re going to work through the whole job description and assign scores to each performance requirement.  The scores are on this scale:

            4 – Outstanding

            3 – Successful

            2 – Needs Improvement

            1 – Unsuccessful

  • Not all items get scores.  For example, the job description may say the employee needs a college degree, but you don’t have to check that degree every time you evaluate him!  The job description specifies which items have scores, and how much weight is assigned to each item.  TIP automatically averages the scores in the prescribed way and computes the result.
  • If you assign a score less than 3 on any item, TIP asks you what’s going to be done to improve performance.  TIP automatically assembles this information into a performance improvement plan.
  • You can fill out the evaluation all at once – but you don’t have to.  Many managers prefer to create the evaluation at the beginning of the year; add comments to it whenever anything comes up; and finally finish it at the end of the year.
  • You can keep modifying the job description that is built into the evaluation while you evaluate the employee.  That way, you don’t have to use last year’s criteria for this year’s work.   If you wish, you can later extract this information and make it into a job description file.