PDRs for Part Time Employees

If you are a Reviewer for someone who works on a part-time basis, it will be important for you to take into account their part-time status when preparing for their PDR. Please ensure that you consider the following:

• Ensure that the date and time of the PDR is organised within the employee’s normal working hours.

• Allow the part-time employee sufficient time to prepare for their PDR – their part-time status may mean they have less opportunity to find time to do this during their normal working hours and they may need a longer lead-in time to the meeting.

A part-time member of staff should not be expected to deliver as many objectives as a full-time member of staff. The following points should be used as a guide:

• The quantity of work a part-time member of staff does should be assessed with their part-time status in mind. Part-time staff must not have the same expectations placed on them as full-time staff.

• Do not assume that a person working 50% of full time for example can deliver 50% of what a full-time person can. There may be hidden duties that are required and take the same amount of time regardless of full or part-time status (PDR preparation being a good example).

• The quality of work a part-time member of staff does should be no different to the quality of work that a member of full-time staff does.

• It is important to be clear whether a part-time colleague is expected to carry out the full range of duties contained in a full time role, albeit on a reduced basis or whether the employee is focusing on a more narrow aspect of a full-time role as this will influence your assessment of performance and the performance objectives you set.

• Although PDR reviews the preceding 12 months only, it may be worth looking at performance in previous years, especially where output looks lower than would normally be expected. This may give you some helpful context to the peaks and troughs of the part-time colleagues’ workload.

When developing objectives for part-time staff consider the following:

• Do not give part-time staff exactly the same objectives as full-time staff and expect the same outcomes in the same timeframe. It is likely to take a part-time member of staff longer to deliver the objective, for example.

• Think about how the part-time nature of the role makes it different to a full-time role and what the particular priorities are. You may need to reduce the number of priorities or increase the timescales for delivery depending on the extent of their part-time status.

• Ensure that there is sufficient focus on development objectives as well as performance objectives. Often a part time role is so busy that the opportunity to develop is harder. However, part-time staff must be given the same opportunities to develop themselves as full-time staff.

Loughborough University is a fair employer and it is critical therefore that when you are setting objectives and reviewing the performance of part-time colleagues, what can be achieved is proportionate to their working time. This ensures that bias in terms of comparisons with full-time members of staff is not made, and that individual colleagues can be reviewed on the basis of what is reasonable in terms of expectations for them in their part-time role. This should always be a consideration when setting objectives and reviewing performance.