Dear Brothers and Sisters of Local 763

I would urge all of you as you are given your yearly company evaluations to read them and if you have a differing opinion concerning your evaluation to ask your supervisor or company representative who gives it to you some or all of the following questions.

1.  Did you get that opinion concerning my work performance or productivity from my Crew Leader or fellow company workers?

2.  If no, why not?

3.  At any time during the past year, when did you explain to me that I needed to improve in the area of performance or productivity so that I might explain why it appears that my performance or productivity might be lacking?

4.  If at any time the supervisor or company representative states “NO” then ask why the supervisor or company representative did not discuss your performance or productivity earlier. Sisters and Brothers, there is an increasing trend at OPPD to use your company performance evaluation in many different ways by your supervisors and managers.  It is very important that you take the company performance evaluations very seriously!

5.  If you do not agree with them, you need to explain to your supervisor or company representative that gives it to you that you do not agree with their opinion and ask what you can do to improve before your next review period.

6.  If it is a training issue, explain that you would like to be provided the necessary training so that you can get a better company performance evaluation during your next review. Explain that you would like to have the training request noted on your evaluation.

7.  If it is a performance or productivity issue, you need to explain and ask it to be noted that the work that you do has many uncontrollable variables associated with your work and ask that your comments be included in your evaluation. There is an increasing trend at OPPD to evaluate employees using a variety of matrixes and other types of systems in an effort to compare employees work to each other.  I am sure that all of you in the IBEW 763 bargaining unit understands that we are not assembly line workers working in a controlled environment and all of us have too many variables to be compared to one another in our work.  The Company Management employees who are developing the matrix systems to use against their employees should first attempt to build a matrix system within their own work duties to use against themselves to help them understand there are too many uncontrollable things that regularly happen in this industry to be compared to others.

The current President of our Company, Gary Gates, has decided that he wants OPPD to become a high performance organization and has several committees formed in an effort that OPPD become a high performance company that has high performance employees I am hoping that out of this HPO effort, the company will develop an evaluation system where employees are truly evaluated in a non-discriminatory manner that is fair and actually helps employees develop themselves.

So again, please take your Company evaluations seriously.  The Company does!