How to Get it Right
Employee appraisal can be tricky. How do you properly validate good results and improve poor results?
If you get this wrong, you will negatively impact your employee. You will also lose a golden opportunity to boost the production of each of your employees; regardless of their current achievement level.
An effective employee appraisal system is a vital component of managing your employees.
Measuring Achievement
Getting the measurement right depends utterly upon setting realistic goals/results for the employee. The benchmarks, against which the employee will be measured, must be fair and clearly understood. The two key activities here are:
- Establishing what a “valid result” is for each employee’s job.
- Measuring the ongoing achievement against the results they achieve.
Performance Reviews
Performance reviews are vital to the process. Your people need to know how you think they are doing in relation to their targets.
It is often surprising to a manager to find out what an employee thinks of their own performance. If there is a wide chasm between your assessment and theirs, don’t wait until you are delivering their final employee appraisal to find this out.
Performance reviews can head off some potentially ugly appraisal meetings.
Giving Appraisals
This is an effort to let the employee know how they are going on the job. When the employee knows exactly where they stand, and what they have to do to improve that standing, it makes for much smoother employee relations.
The proper performance appraisal tools are essential here.
Promotions (or the rationale for not giving them) are much easier to manage when a formal statement of the employee’s goals and desired results is agreed upon.
Career Development
Top producers need to be continually challenged. Career planning is therefore a key factor in managing them.
When a Top Performer starts a new job, the challenge is high. They have a lot to learn and they are, as yet, far from their peak production levels. As they scale the mountain of their new challenge, they master the major peaks and finally reach a plateau.
Career development is an important part of each employee appraisal.