The point of Performance Management

Performance Appraisal time ... and this  isn't the most popular part of an employee’s job. Though companies around the world commit to them every year, sadly 45% of employees think they are a complete waste of time.

One of the biggest issues employees have with performance reviews is that they always seem punitive. Why else would someone schedule a meeting to discuss performance out of thin air, if not to tackle some problem they’ve been having lately? Because of the pressures involved in a “surprise" performance appraisal, 89% of employees would prefer it if their reviews didn’t come up on short notice.

Setting the stage is important when discussing performance, and springing these meetings on employees is poor talent management. Few insights... which can turnaround the thoughts of employees on appraisal time..

Don’t Get Personal

One thing to remember when conducting performance reviews is knowing where your feedback should start and stop. Most notably, when a problem has to do with performance and when it’s simply a personality trait.

Implement 360 Feedback

Another reason employees might not see reviews as valuable is because they don’t think the feedback they’re getting from a single person can form an accurate picture of their performance, especially of the manager reviewing them is rarely the ones working with them.

Rating Scale

The scale is usually 5 points with 5 being “unsatisfactory or not meeting standard” and 1 being “outstanding or exceeding the standard.” It's used to rate broad topics like attendance, quality of work, job knowledge, etc. But simply getting an assigned number isn't a substitute for specific feedback. It doesn't tell the employee about expectations and where they can improve.

Be careful about bias when giving employee feedback and ratings.
In fairness, some managers do a good job of giving managers definitions for each point on the rating scale. But managers have to be careful that bias doesn’t creep into their evaluation. For example, leniency can occur when managers have a lot of performance appraisals to complete. Everyone becomes “satisfactory” in order to get the reviews completed.

Another bias happens when managers feel no one is perfect and not worthy of the highest rating. This gets particularly tricky when one manager is willing to give an employee the highest rating and another isn’t. Not only is the manager acting with bias, but the organization isn’t consistent in the way they measure performance.

"HR to ensure that the Managers have a workshop in giving employee a feedback"

One of the ways to combat bias is to make sure that managers are trained on the proper way to evaluate performance and have feedback conversations. Many organizations that use a rating scale assign the center point (usually a 3 rating) with “meeting the company performance standard.” Employees should know what meeting the standard looks like. This is something that should have be communicated during on boarding and subsequent training. This is why feedback is important. The importance of feedback over ratings.

Managers have the opportunity to tell employees in a very specific way when they exceed the company standard.

If you want employees to go above and beyond, give 110% or whatever other cliché you’d like to use… then you have to tell them what exceptional performance looks like. They can’t do it if they don’t know.

And obviously, when it comes to telling employees they’re not meeting the standard, we’re not telling employees because we want them to replicate the behavior but because we don’t want employees to.

Here’s an example of why feedback is so critically important. If  you go to a restaurant and they get your order wrong, then you should tell them. If you don’t tell them, they don’t have the opportunity to fix the situation. If you don’t tell them, they will continue to do the same thing.