The following real life experience emphasize Richard Smith's statement "I maintain a very strong opinion that comparing one months activity to another just doesn't tell you much." In 1971 while a graduate student I started working as a "casual" (i.e. part time, temporary) employee at the Federal Records Center in Ft. Worth with my primary job being pulling/refiling Income Tax Returns that were less than 3-years old. I went to my first formal evaluation feeling good about my performance because I was more mature and conscientious than most of my peers. Mr. Garza pulled out a file that documented the number of files each of us had worked and had statistics showing how many files the average person worked per hour. My average was well below normal. I was shocked and disappointed in myself even when Mr. Garza stated that though my numbers were below the norm they were still acceptable. But Mr. Garza went on to explain why my numbers were low. First, there was my gender. As a group women were faster than the men because of their finer motor skills. (He also noted that men as a group were superior to women when the job called for muscle such as shelving, shifting, or pulling entire groups of boxes.) Second, I came to work early in the morning and worked the batches of requests and refiles that had been left over from the day before. Others came in later after the new batches arrived and, human nature being human nature, worked the easiest ones leaving those of us who came early with the more difficult, time consuming ones. He emphasized despite the fact that my statistics were below the mean average my performance more than adequate. So the bottom line is that statistics is that can identify performance outliers that merit further analysis but competent supervisors must be aware of factors that do not show up on graphs before judging performance of individuals or groups. Paul R. Scott CA, CRM Records Management Officer Harris County, TX List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance