PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENTS
 My company will soon exhibit in its first international show. How is staffing an exhibit overseas different than staffing a domestic show, and what should I do to prepare my staff?
 To help your team progress toward their goals, you need to assess performance accurately and frequently. Unfortunately, most managers spend little time gathering performance information, which results in inaccurate judgments and ineffective evaluations. So rather than being a chore you tackle once a year, performance assessments should involve ongoing information gathering along with continual feedback and coaching. Your ongoing evaluation process should include the following steps.
1. Set performance indicators. Before you can evaluate employee performance, you first need to know what you’re trying to evaluate. So you need to set performance indicators for your department and each employee.
Begin your management role by making sure that you and your team know exactly what you will be evaluating over the year. After all, you can’t expect good performance when you haven’t clearly communicated your expectations. Plus, holding employees accountable for uncommunicated expectations will likely squelch their motivation entirely. So communicate your expectations to your staff explicitly and in writing.
2. Start a performance journal. Once you’ve established specific performance indicators, start a “critical-incidents” journal for each employee. While the term sounds ominous, this journal is simply a place for you to note important activities related to each employee’s performance indicators.
So rather than waiting until yearly performance-review time and wracking your brain for specific examples of each employee’s performance, use the journal to jot down activities as they occur. Or better yet, set aside 20 minutes at the end of every week to make a quick note about each employee’s performance. A few minutes each week will not only save you hours of time and aggravation at the end of the year, it’ll improve the accuracy of your evaluations.
3. Create opportunities to observe performance. Far too often, employees and managers work in a vacuum, with everyone so embroiled in their own tasks that they rarely interact with each other. So be sure to make time for observations. Create opportunities to observe, review, and understand employee performance. You may need to set formal meetings with employees, take them to lunch, stop by their offices, or even follow them around to witness their performance. In any case, your goal is to talk with and observe them to understand how they’ve performed and why they’ve performed that way. Not only will you secure valuable information to help in your performance assessment, but you’ll likely head off problems and assist employees and your department in achieving their goals.
4. Provide feedback and coaching. Too often, managers ambush employees in their yearly reviews. Employees suddenly discover that their work hasn’t been up to snuff for an entire year — and they’re not sure where, or on what project, they went wrong. Thus, continual feedback and coaching are not just critical components of employee evaluations, they’re essential and expected by your employees. Again, don’t wait until the yearly review to provide feedback and assistance. Offer it at the time the noteworthy activity is happening. Immediacy is key to improving behavior and heading off long-term problems.
By making your best effort to coach and support your employees, they will come to trust that you are in their corner, and not setting them up to fail. Building employment relationships on the basis of these guidelines will ultimately build strong employee commitment and will make you a better manager.
— Terrence Bishop, Ph.D., associate professor of management, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL
INTERNATIONAL STAFFING
My company will soon exhibit in its first international show. How is staffing an exhibit overseas different than staffing
a domestic show, and what should I do to prepare my staff?
Just the fact that you’re asking the question puts you leaps and bounds ahead of most of your competition, as most people assume booth-staffing requirements are the same all over the world. In fact, however, staffing an exhibit at an international show is significantly different than staffing U.S. shows, and there are several things you can do to better prepare your staff.
Compared to domestic shows, international trade shows typically offer longer show hours and more exhibit-hall traffic. Plus, most attendees at international shows expect to have long, relationship-building conversations rather than short, surface-level conversations about your products and company. Thus, you’ll need more people to staff your international exhibit compared to a comparable domestic exhibit.
It’s also critical to understand attendee demographics. International shows attract key decision makers and top executives, as opposed to the mix of decision makers, recommenders, and influencers found at most U.S. shows. Thus, international attendees expect to meet with your company’s top executives, which means you must have an ample supply of such people on hand in your exhibit. In keeping with executive-level attire, attendees typically expect exhibitors to wear business attire, such as suits and skirts, rather than logo-adorned uniforms.
To better prepare your staffers to interact with international booth visitors, collect and distribute information about local culture and customs, and be sure to cover key cultural differences in your pre-show training.
Schedule staffers to arrive in the show city 24 hours prior to booth duty to provide them with adequate time to recuperate and adjust to their new surroundings and time zone. Also arm staff with the proper telecommunication and electrical converters as well as train and bus schedules and maps. Finally, educate staffers about local currency and approximate costs of items such as taxi fares.
While these tips may sound simplistic, a well-prepared and properly equipped staff can effectively take the focus off of a new environment and transfer it onto your booth visitors.
— Jori Wilmoth, manager, international services, Derse Inc., Milwaukee
I&D RULES OF THUMB
No matter what I do, I always seem to overestimate the amount of time needed for
installation and dismantle. Are there any rules of thumb to help
me get it right?
You can estimate an hour of setup for every 10 feet of a linear pop-up or modular exhibit and two hours for every 10 feet of a custom
exhibit. Dismantle should take approximately half as long as installation.
For a large, complex peninsula or island exhibit, estimate one hour of setup and dismantle time for every 8 square feet. Setup will use approximately two-thirds of those hours, while tear down will require one-third.
— Candy Adams, CTSM, CME, CEM, CMP, CMM, The Booth Mom, independent exhibit-management consultant, trainer, speaker, and writer, Defiance, OH
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