Performance appraisals involve assessing employees’ contributions to the overall business objectives.
Some employee-related challenges like low output, not having the right skills for a task, or misconduct can be easily spotted by performance appraisals and quickly resolved.
Performance appraisals are an excellent remedy to a lot of challenges affecting a business when done correctly.
Here are five mistakes made during performance appraisal and some suggestions on how your organisation can avoid them:
1. Infrequent performance appraisals
Reviews are carried out majorly to provide feedback on how well an employee has helped the business achieve its goals and objectives.
As a result of the time usually spent on performance reviews, many organisations tend to restrict them to holding only once a year.
The problem with holding infrequent appraisals is that employees will generally be judged for what they have done in the weeks leading to the review. This means that mistakes and successes from earlier in the year mostly pass by unnoticed.
Additionally, infrequent appraisals will mean that your employees are not getting enough feedback from line managers, so mistakes that employees or misconceptions that could have been corrected earlier are repeated until the next review, resulting in a waste of resources.
Running several appraisals and frequent check-ins works best because your employees are getting constant feedback and continuously improving the quality of their work to their benefit and the organisation’s benefit.
Read: Top 6 Strategies For Effective Performance Management
2. Unobjective performance reviews
A face-to-face interview can be affected by the HR manager’s approach. Being overly kind without giving constructive criticism for improvement is definitely a miss or being overly hard without empathy can also be detrimental.
During the performance appraisal interview, it is important for HR managers to have an open mind while addressing the employee.
3. Concluding appraisals without feedback for improvement
Constructive feedback is the cornerstone of a sound appraisal system. While HR managers should provide unbiased feedback about employees’ strengths and weaknesses, they should also give feedback on how the employee can do better, or even suggest helpful measures.
4. Having one-sided conversations
Performance appraisals usually involve some form of face-to-face interactions with employees. However, some HR managers speak a lot during the interview and do not participate in active listening.
Remember that communication is not complete until feedback is received. It is necessary to balance listening and talking, so the employee feels relaxed enough to interact effectively and share more context during the review.
Read: 5 Performance Metrics You Should Be Tracking
5. No post appraisal action plan
The challenge here is this – what happens after performance appraisals? Some HR managers fall victim to not planning for what should happen post appraisal season.
After appraisals are concluded, HR and line managers need to make recommendations to management based on company-wide trends and individual performance.
Post appraisal recommendations may include trainings, restructuring of tasks, taking certified exams, promotions, etc.
With SeamlessPerformance, performance management will no longer be an afterthought but a series of activities that bring your business a step closer to organisational success.
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