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Belling the Performance Appraisal Cat
Clarity and transparency coupled with regular and objective feedback are key to enhance performance
Twice in a year for a couple of weeks it was always a mayhem. Those were the time of the year to ensure that the performance appraisal of the staff were completed. The staff looked forward to a good appraisal which they naturally equated to promotions, salary increments and bonuses. Managers struggled to carry out the process they hated the most and yet knew that there was no escape. Indeed, we all understood the real purpose of performance appraisal of setting goals to gear staff toward customer service and professional development. So at the beginning of the period, objectives would accordingly get set. But during the period under the heavy burden of work inevitably the objectives would get lost. How exactly the staff performed in the assorted engagements would languish in grey memory, at best remembered in fragments. Often the very recent performance would weigh in heavily over everything that happened during the period. Again, managers cannot be seen to be either too lenient or too strict. Yet a vastly middle of the way would not allow to distinguish between the very good and the very bad performers. Then there were subjective criteria such as interpersonal competence or readiness for leadership which would suffer from the halo effect resulting from the manager's perception of staff from their performance in quantity or quality of work done. Finally, there were personal biases - likes and dislikes, racial or sexual preferences etc. which would obfuscate objective assessments while creating undercurrents from widespread staff disgruntlement. Meanwhile client work would not give any respite to anyone. At the annual management meeting a great bulk of the time would be spent tweaking the "problematic" performance appraisal system and periodically dumping the older one for the latest appraisal system that seemed to be a panacea for our performance woes. Still the history would repeat again and again. Is the problem with the well thought out performance appraisal system or the way we perform our work?
After all, the five key characteristics of an effective performance appraisal system are pretty much standard:
1. Clear appraisal objectives;
2. Accurate, valid and reliable data;
3. Well-defined performance criteria;
4. Less time consuming; and
5. Post appraisal review.
Hence the devil must be in the detail. Focusing on what makes us as customers, managers and workers tick, Jusvista brings about a process that while keeping the appraisal system simple, accurate and self-evident for the employees, frees time for managers to objectively appraise non-job factors critical for professional development of employees.
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