Written By: Mihaela Cracea

Pachiu & Associates

Bucharest, Romania

Since May 1st, when they entered in force, the new Labor Code amendments are creating implementation difficulties for most of the employers.

One of the most controversial and intensely debated change pertains to the incumbency of job descriptions and the identification and implementation, at company level, of professional activity evaluation criteria. Such need to be included both in the individual labor agreements of employees and in the internal regulations.

Even though such criteria seem to be an intricate task for the employers, once their implementation is complete, they will work as a powerful tool in assessing the employees’ qualification and in making either a decision of promotion, inclusion in training programs or dismissal.

Despite the fact that many employers regularly conducted employee evaluations even before these amendments, ,in what regards dismissals for professional inadequacy, the employers met with real difficulties in taking such measures in absence of job descriptions which, although provided by law, were not compulsory, and as well as in absence of specific evaluation criteria for the employees.

The job description is now mandatory. It is the document outlining the responsibilities a certain position involves and the only benchmark for employees’ performance evaluation.

In other words, an employee’s assessment cannot be conceived without initially specified performance criteria or tasks, designed to be easily but also objectively analyzed, assessed and considered.

Therefore, with a view of clarifying and rendering efficiency to labor relations, this legislative amendment requires the employees to specify, a priori, the employees’ professional duties (by handing the job description) and also the criteria used for the performance evaluation (by their mandatory inclusion in the individual labor agreements and in the internal regulations).

In order to be useful in the evaluation process, both the responsibilities in the job description and the evaluation criteria need to be clearly detailed. Too general tasks or some evaluation criteria that would not cover all types of employees’ responsibilities are not sufficient.

In assigning the evaluation criteria generally applicable at company level, all positions in the organizational chart and all the attributions pertaining to a specific position will be taken into account, to ensure the possibility to evaluate each responsibility according to a specific assessment criteria.

Basically, the evaluation criteria should be regarded as performance indicators, reference patterns for the employees’ proficiency.

A few examples of this type of criteria may be: knowledge and level of implementation of work duties, compliance with deadlines, accuracy in execution, productivity, teamwork, organization, customer satisfaction, leadership skills.

Even though some of the evaluation criteria will be the same and shall be applied to various types of responsibilities and others shall be applied only to some categories of duties, they all need to be listed in the internal regulation and in the employee’s individual labor agreements. For previously hired employees, the conclusion of additional acts to labor agreements is required.

Although the law provides for mandatory conclusion of additional acts within 20 working days as of the day of entry into force of the new amendments concerning the Labor Code, that is to say, by the end of May, no sanction for failure to comply with this deadline is established. However, insofar as, after a control of the labor inspectors, the obligation to conclude such additional acts by a given deadline will be imposed to the employer, failure to observe such deadline could result in a fine between 1.000 USD and 3,300 USD.

Distinct from the general assessment criteria, the employer has the right, and not the liability, to determine supplemental duties and targets for the employees, such as: number of customers, generated turnover, volume of revenues.

These objectives may be determined by the job description or other separate documents acknowledged by the employees and may be computed on an annual or half-yearly basis, depending on the employer’s needs.

To conclude, whether we refer to job duties, employees’ general assessment criteria or self performance objectives, although they are apparently difficult to implement, these are necessary in order to offer the employers real chances to identify performance or improvement needs among the employees.

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