What Are Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales? BARS Examples and Benefits
Imagine a world where performance reviews are clear, concise, and free of ambiguity. Where feedback isn't a vague notion but a concrete, actionable tool. This is the realm of Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales (BARS).
Gone are the days of subjective evaluations and generic statements. BARS are the bridge that connects abstract performance traits with concrete behavioral examples. This isn't just a rating scale; it's a narrative, telling the story of what each performance level looks like in real-life situations.
In this article, we're diving into the nuts and bolts of BARS:
- Sharing concrete examples of BARS that leave no room for confusion to its tailored nature that fits unique job roles like a glove.
- The many benefits of BARS. Think: enhanced feedback quality, objective assessments, targeted development – the list goes on.
- Steps and best practices for developing and implementing BARS in your organization.
A Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale (BARS) is a performance evaluation method that uses specific behavioral examples, ranging from least to most effective, to rate employee performance. This scale combines qualitative and quantitative measures to provide a more comprehensive and objective assessment of an employee's abilities and actions.
BARS is an appraisal method based on real-world examples of employee behavior.
As a result, behaviorally anchored rating scales are not one-size-fits-all. They are meticulously tailored to different job roles, capturing the essence of what success looks like in each unique position.
📊 What is a behaviorally anchored rating scale?
A Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale (BARS) is a performance evaluation method that uses specific behavioral examples, ranging from least to most effective, to rate employee performance. This scale combines qualitative and quantitative measures to provide a more comprehensive and objective assessment of an employee's abilities and actions.
BARS is an appraisal method based on real-world examples of employee behavior.
As a result, behaviorally anchored rating scales are not one-size-fits-all. They are meticulously tailored to different job roles, capturing the essence of what success looks like in each unique position.
Here's a comparison.
Non-BARS assessment example
Subject: John Doe
Teamwork score: B+
Behaviourally anchored rating scale example
Subject: John Doe
Teamwork BARS:
- Never contributes to group discussions and is unreliable
- Rarely contributes to group discussions and is semi-reliable
- Sometimes contributes to group discussions and is usually reliable
- Often contributes to group discussions and is reliable
- Communicates well in group discussions and is very dependable
Generic grading systems often lack a foundation for clear, meaningful appraisals.
Without strong guidelines, these grades provide little more than a vague sense of whether the subject is strong, weak, or average in any given category.
Not only that, but different reviewers are liable to give different scores based on bias or whether they are picky graders.
BARS, on the other hand, includes built-in guidelines to help reviewers make an accurate and objective appraisal.
Rather than scoring an employee with scale points ranging from 1-5, five examples are provided, and the reviewer chooses the option that most closely reflects the subject. This reduces bias and results in more consistency between reviewers.
Essentially, BARS simplifies the process by removing an interpretive layer. Rather than trying to quantify a subject's behavior, the reviewer merely views each example as a yes-or-no question.
Removing the unnecessary translation to a number or letter grade leaves less room for subjectivity.
🏢 5 Behaviorally anchored rating scale examples
Here are some more examples of BARS in action:
Decision quality BARS by level from UPenn Human Resources
Here is a small excerpt from the elaborate BARS on decision quality from UPenn.
Individual contributor
Needs improvement: Shows flawed or inconsistent judgment on routine, day-to-day matters; leaves some matters unaddressed or handles them ineffectively.
Meets expectations: Usually makes the right decisions on routine, day-to-day matters.
Exceeds expectations: Consistently demonstrates strong judgment; may be sought out by others for expertise and guidance.
Supervisor/manager
Needs improvement: Delays making potentially contentious decisions or avoids acting on initiatives that may be unpopular among team members.
Meets expectations: Demonstrates an ability to make tough decisions and advance initiatives that may be unpopular.
Exceeds expectations: Confidently makes choices in the best interests of the organization and deals constructively with resistance or adverse reactions from others.
Director/Executive
Needs improvement: Hesitates excessively when called upon to make tough decisions or difficult trade-offs; shies away from making tough choices.
Meets expectations: Typically steps forward and makes tough decisions or difficult trade-offs.
Exceeds expectations: Quickly and confidently makes tough decisions and difficult trade-offs, skillfully balancing analysis with decisiveness.
Overall job performance BARS example from Purdue University
Here is an excerpt from the Behavior Anchor Rating Scales used by Purdue University focused on overall job performance.
The overall job performance rating defines the employee's level of execution of duties and responsibilities aligned to the job description and job family.
Does not meet expectations
- Failed to meet fundamental job responsibilities; negative impact on customers and/or unit success.
- Significant loss of confidence in the employee's performance outcomes.
Needs improvement
- Produces inconsistent performance outcomes, occasionally failing to meet some key responsibilities.
- At times, the employee did not fully execute their job independently; required elevated levels of assistance; contributions to unit goals were minimal.
Meets expectations
- Achieves all job responsibilities.
- Understands unit goals; works collaboratively with colleagues to attain unit success.
Exceeds expectations
- Drives performance outcomes, process improvement, and change initiatives beyond current job expectations; generates measurable increased performance outcomes.
- Establishes and delivers significantly higher levels of customer service beyond existing job standards.
Outstanding
- Serves as a role model, leading by example, and elevates unit performance levels in a manner that measurably improves unit success.
- Takes the initiative to proactively coach others during process improvement and change management initiatives, significantly enhancing unit success.
Culture and values BARS example from Purdue University
Purdue University also uses culture and values BARS as part of their review process. The culture and values rating defines the employee's attainment of relationship and culture expectations.
Does not meet expectations
- Treats others with hostility or indifference.
- Works well with some people but not others; is not generally regarded as a "team player."
Needs improvement
- Occasionally completes projects without effectively engaging key stakeholders.
- Occasionally demonstrates a lack of interest and respect towards others.
Meets expectations
- Consistently works with others to accomplish individual and unit goals.
- Honors commitment to others.
- Treats others with respect and courtesy.
Exceeds expectations
- Proactively works to elevate and attain unit goals.
- Outwardly demonstrates appreciation for and values the input of others; incorporates differing views to resolve a situation.
Outstanding
- Facilitates communication between people experiencing complex interpersonal conflict; brings focus and resolution to significant challenges and obstacles.
- Builds loyal relationships at all levels of the University and across stakeholder groups.
Behaviorally anchored rating scale for a salesperson
Competency: Industry knowledge
- The salesperson's lack of knowledge often limits their ability to close deals.
- The salesperson has limited knowledge that is sufficient for easy customers.
- The salesperson is knowledgeable about the core areas of the industry.
- The salesperson has advanced industry knowledge and uses it to close deals effectively.
- The salesperson is an authority in the industry whose expertise is sought out by customers.
Competency: Customer service skills
- Many clients find the salesperson unpleasant or unhelpful.
- The salesperson lacks personal qualities beyond the bare minimum to deal with clients.
- The salesperson is agreeable, if not memorable, and usually provides a positive experience.
- Most clients enjoy speaking with the salesperson and have a fond opinion of them overall.
- Clients consider the salesperson a friend with their best interest at heart.
Competency: Work ethic
- The salesperson puts forth minimal effort/hours, which reflects in their performance
- The salesperson rarely goes above and beyond to close a deal or chase a lead
- The salesperson pursues opportunities wisely without noteworthy ambition
- The salesperson regularly demonstrates a drive greater than expected to get results.
- The salesperson always goes the extra mile to make a sale or acquire new leads.
Behaviorally anchored rating scale for customer service representative
Trainee initial evaluation:
- Lacked the talent or willingness to perform the role.
- Struggled to communicate well over the phone with customers.
- Showed fair people skills but lacked polish or persuasiveness.
- Spoke well with customers with few stumbles or pauses.
- Responded well to customers despite limited knowledge. A natural conversationalist.
➡️ Explore other performance rating scales examples, such as 5-point and 10-point scales, and many more.
⚖️ Is BARS a good appraisal method? Behaviorally anchored rating scale advantages and disadvantages
The simple answer is yes. Supposing you have the time and resources to implement BARS as a part of your performance management process, the benefits are difficult to ignore.
BARS offers scalability, adaptability, and objectivity from entry-level to executive positions.
Instead of ambiguous scores, BARS offers tangible behaviors that highlight the strengths and weaknesses of employees in any role.
By adapting real-world examples to multiple-choice questions that demonstrate different levels of competence, choosing the answer that best matches the subject is easy.
You can track changes in performance by conducting the same questions over time and measuring changes in the results. Ideally, BARS will parallel the expectations of a position as a measure of performance.
All in all, BARS has many benefits for companies with the infrastructure to implement them. They can be used independently or to supplement other performance evaluation methods. This leaves little room for disadvantages other than the investment of time from people operations.
🪜 What are the steps in developing BARS?
Creating BARS is a relatively simple process, though time-consuming for large organizations. In most cases, people operations are in charge of developing the BARS. HR or management may handle the actual assessments.
Ideally, the collaboration between management and HR provides more ideas and perspectives for more relevant BARS. Including employees themselves in the process when possible is also a good idea.
Below are the behaviorally anchored rating scale steps for any team:
Identify critical behaviors
The first step of creating BARS is also the end goal. Identifying essential skills and behaviors to improve gives you a starting point for developing relevant scenarios.
Create a list of performance dimensions
Performance dimensions are the actions and behaviors needed to fulfill the expectations of a role. You may already have a list of job responsibilities; the next step is to dig deeper and categorize those traits and expectations into a list that you can transform into BARS.
Develop behavioral anchors
The most distinct (and fun) part of BARS is developing the anchors. The goal is to create highly relevant scenarios for the subject and their role, along with five behaviors representing different competency levels.
Pilot the BARS
Conducting a test run is a good idea before going all in on a new performance measuring system. Starting with a small sample group allows you to iron out issues before a full-scale launch.
Conduct BARS evaluation
With the BARS created and process tested, you can now administer employee performance ratings across the board. Whether HR or management is conducting the reviews, they choose the behavioral anchor that most closely represents the reviewee for each scenario.
Make improvements
After the pilot run and subsequent evaluations, continue to make adjustments and expand the scope of your scales. Reusing core BARS can help monitor trends and individual growth, but exploring other skill sets will provide additional valuable data.
Guest speaker Adam Weber on the HRchat podcast episode "What Separates Top HR Leaders From the Rest" said that one of the five traits that top HR professionals possess is the ability to "make informed decisions on what to prioritize" and "strategically rank and focus on what we work on proactively based on what we see in the data."
Simply conducting reviews and giving scores is only part of the job. It is critical to follow through by using those results to improve employee performance and the process itself.
Sync BARS with performance management systems
Efficiency is a big deal for busy HR departments. Integrating BARS with existing competency models is a smart way to kill two birds with one stone.
BARS can often be quantified on a five-point scale. While a numerical scoring system may seem counterintuitive, it can provide valuable insights. It may even replace another performance management scale or performance rating system.
🔎 See how other companies are defining their competency models.
🕵️♀️ Is the BARS method of evaluating employee performance right for you?
While the BARS method offers a lot of advantages, it isn't the best fit for every company. Factors such as business size, HR resources, and company culture will determine how much ROI to expect by implementing BARS.
Here are some key elements to consider when deciding to make the change:
Business size and age
Creating BARS takes time. There's no way around it. Especially as you introduce this new employee appraisal process, new scenarios will need to be made for each role in the company.
For larger companies, this can be a significant hurdle.
Plus, for businesses that are happy with their current appraisal system, the juice may not be worth the squeeze.
Just remember that BARS can supplement existing appraisal methods. Even a tiny people operations team can adopt BARS over time (though it may take weeks or even months to create all of the scenarios). Future cycles will go faster because you can reuse and recycle your work.
Available HR resources
Some HR departments are so busy keeping up with the day-to-day that introducing something new is low on the priority list. Finding the time to update the performance evaluation process and create BARS scenarios might feel like a pipe dream.
If you think the advantages of BARS will make an impact, pitch the idea to leaders and shareholders. They may find it worthwhile to divert extra resources to make it happen.
Crowdsourcing input from your coworkers is one possible solution. Asking managers or employees to submit scenarios will spread the work and provide fresh insight from those closest to each role.
Company culture
On paper, objectivity in performance evaluations seems like an undeniably good thing.
However, a downside of objectivity is telling the hard truth to some employees. Where more ambiguous performance appraisal scales can be softened up to avoid offending specific individuals, BARS make it a little harder to fudge the numbers. This can lead to a perception of harshness that some employees may respond poorly to.
Some companies will embrace a tough-love approach to ferreting out the truth. Still, others may be hesitant to cause confrontation. The important thing is to be prepared to address low scores with solutions for support and improvement.
Developmental focus
For many companies, performance appraisals are little more than an inconvenient obligation. Annual reviews are the simplest way to keep employees on track and manage productivity. In these cases, the extra effort of BARS may be unattractive.
But BARS is a great conversation starter for companies focusing on developmental vs evaluative feedback.
Rather than saying, "You were a 7 out of 10 employee last year," you can point to specific strong behaviors or others that could use improvement.
➡️ Compare other performance evaluation methods for your business.
💡 Implementing BARS in your performance reviews: 5 Tips
BARS diverges from traditional rating scales in several ways. While this is mainly for the better, you will likely encounter some confusion on behalf of employees and managers new to the process.
Below are some common pitfalls and how to avoid them.
Avoid confusion with clear communication
BARS can replace or supplement existing performance appraisal processes. Whenever making a change to an established process, it is important to communicate those changes in advance to avoid surprises and unwarranted anxiety.
Sending preemptive emails introducing the idea of BARS and explaining how and why this new method is being adopted ensures everyone is on the same page. A brief definition, example, and explanation of why People Ops implements this new tactic will go a long way.
Be clear that BARS aims to offer a more objective, helpful way of rating performance that will benefit the company and employees alike!
Provide transparent training to management
After introducing the idea to everyone, anyone creating or conducting BARS assessments will require some training. This will improve the effectiveness and consistency between different reviewers.
Educate employees and set expectations
When transitioning to a new review system, it is also wise to educate employees. Explaining why you are making changes will help them understand the benefits and be more engaged in the process.
Establishing expectations will prevent anxiety or negative feelings about the BARS system. The results of BARS sometimes feel more direct or blunt (because they are more objective). Still, you should pivot to offer support rather than judgment in these cases.
Transitioning to digital performance reviews
Since you are already making changes to the procedure, consider also upgrading to performance management software. Digital performance reviews offer a lot of benefits for HR, employees, and the company as a whole.
Tools like Zavvy save a lot of time tracking and measuring employee performance while allowing new options like 360-degree feedback and remote check-ins.
➡️ Compare the top performance management tools on the market today.
Embrace creativity in BARS scenarios and scales
Creating BARS scenarios requires in-depth knowledge about employee roles and a bit of creativity. You can continually expand and adjust over time but try to come up with relevant and meaningful scenarios, even if you only start with a few.
If you are struggling, collaborate with managers and employees to clarify important aspects of each role and department. This is an opportunity to learn about different positions and improve engagement.
🔎 Read more performance review tips and learn how to write performance reviews that matter.
➡️ Where performance meets precision: Implement BARS with Zavvy
BARS assessments are just one of many ways to measure employee performance.
Zavvy's HR software suite offers a versatile infrastructure for managing employee performance using BARS or just about any other method.
The flexibility of Zavvy's 360° growth system gives people operations departments all the tools they need, from performance review software to employee development software and much more.
You have complete control to customize these processes for BARS and other strategies, and you don't need any special technical knowledge to do it.
Everything from performance reviews and follow-ups, training, employee development plans, and creating, managing, and tracking BARS assessments can be handled in one place. That means no messy spreadsheets, lost files, or time-consuming manual record-keeping.
📅 Reach out today to schedule a 100% free demo where we demonstrate how our human resources software could solve and streamline the performance challenges of your business!