Juclyde C.

Cababat

MM 214- Performance Management

Wednesday 6:00-9:00 pm

Comparative assessment of the appraisal pertaining to gathering performance

evaluation.

There are a lot of conflicting messages out there about performance appraisals.

One publication may tell you to formalize and standardize everything. Another

will say businesses today can get away with informal coaching. Where does that

leave you?

We’ll unpack some of these ideas in a section dedicated to the appraisal process,

but let’s look at a few tried-and-true ideas behind appraisal best practices:

 Different organizations formalize their appraisal process to varying

degrees, but some form of standardization is almost always necessary to

ensure employees understand what to expect when they’re evaluated and

to safeguard against accusations of discrimination. It’s easier to provide an

equal opportunity when workers in similar roles go through similar

appraisal processes.

 Make your performance appraisal program valuable to and realistic for

your specific business. Every company is different, and if you chase after
 trendy ideas, you can end up constantly shifting your programs and not

getting anywhere.

 It’s increasingly necessary to take advantage of the ways digital

technologies can empower your business to gather feedback on employee

performance and gain deeper insights into how people work.

This isn’t, by any means, an exhaustive look at best practices. But these are three

key ideas that will inform the rest of this guide.

The importance of performance appraisals

It can be tempting to try to minimize the resources you put into performance

appraisals. It’s often tough to concretely assess workers, and your managers know

their team well anyway, so why go through all the effort? The logic there makes

some sense, but in practice, there are so many factors impacting employee

performance, and so many parts of the business affected by how engaged workers

are, that it’s important to get appraisals right.

Here’s why performance appraisals matter.

1. Employee engagement and retention

A Gallup study covering data from 2018 found that the average employee

engagement rate in the U.S. was 34 percent . Thirteen percent of workers

were actively disengaged. These are sobering figures, but what may be

more concerning is that they represent significant progress in the U.S.

workforce.
It isn’t rocket science; engaged employees are more likely to stick around

because they are happier and more fulfilled in their work. Neutral or

disengaged workers are more likely to jump ship and look for a better job

elsewhere. The Gallup study found that the extent to which workers are

engaged is significantly tied to business outcomes.

Imagine you have a team of office assistants. They are highly organized,

have project management skills, and are instrumental in driving company

culture. They also spend a lot of time on clerical work — the kind of low-

level tasks many people in the business value but that may feel kind of rote

and tedious to the office assistants. If you don’t regularly connect with

these employees to talk about performance, how are they going to see the

link between what they do and the positive business outcomes the company

is experiencing?

Effective performance appraisals can provide employees with a clear idea of

how they’re valuable to the business. They can give them insight on not

only the opportunities they have to grow but how that development can

affect the larger goals of the company. This is what drives engagement.

Nobody wants to do work that doesn’t mean much. But when employees —

regardless of role — understand how they create value for their employer,

they are more likely to be engaged.

The point of the performance appraisal is to evaluate employees, but the

end result can be much bigger. View the time spent as an invaluable

investment to fuel engagement. When your employees are more focused

 and engaged, they’re not only more productive, but also more likely to

remain loyal to the business and to stick around.

2. Training and development

Engagement isn’t only about giving employees a purpose. People also seek

opportunities to grow. It gets boring doing the same thing every day,

especially if you don’t have a path to a better or different position within

the company. Nobody sets out to be an office drone.

But how do you get your employees to invest in training and skills

development? In modern business, people don’t start in the mailroom and

climb their way to upper management over the course of 30 years with the

same company. Today, businesses need ways to develop workers who often

come into the job with specialized skills and are looking for a promotion or

a new position within just a year or two.

You’re not always going to keep up with every employee’s ambitions, but

in addition to giving them a sense of their impact, providing them with a

path for skills development, training, and long-term job growth are among

the best methods for keeping them engaged.

Imagine you have an employee who has been with the company for a few

years. They do good work and like the business but don’t have a clear idea

of a specific job role to grow into. You could let this person stagnate and

keep getting through each day, gradually becoming bored and disengaged,

or you could use your performance appraisal process to identify the

employee’s top skills relative to what your company prioritizes. From there,
 you can coach the employee to develop those skills and recommend

training opportunities so they can build toward future promotion.

Whether that person goes on to be a leader in your business or is simply

more productive and engaged, you’re getting value from the performance

appraisal process.

3. Employee recognition

Employee recognition comes in many forms. You can give employees

bonuses based on performance. You can give managers a budget to take

team members out to lunch once a quarter and praise the work they’ve

done. Or you can make an effort to publicly thank top performers during

company meetings. The bottom line is, you have a lot of options.

Formalizing employee recognition ties back to that earlier point we made about

the connection between positive business outcomes and employee engagement. If

you don’t recognize how individual workers contribute to your business

outcomes, then your employees may feel undervalued and underappreciated.

That’s a recipe for disengagement.

You can counter this issue by incorporating recognition into your performance

appraisal program. Matt Grawitch, a professor of psychology at St. Louis

University, told HR Dive that formal recognition happens in a variety of ways ,

both casually and systemically:

Most people appreciate a simple “thank you” from time to time, but recognition,

as a broader practice, is about employers demonstrating to people that what they

bring to the table adds value in some capacity. Whether we are talking about
paying people fairly for the work they do, highlighting when employees achieve

various milestones in performance or tenure, or calling attention to specific

outstanding behavior, recognition sends the message that employees make

valuable contributions and are instrumental in the success of the organization.

Building some form of recognition into your performance appraisal process can

help employees see the connection between the work they do and the rest of the

business. It creates a stronger link between workers and the organization and

drives engagement.

You can do this in a variety of ways, from formalized events where you highlight

standout work to a culture of frequent shout-outs for achievement. The key is to

think holistically so you aren’t constantly recognizing people in some roles while

neglecting other parts of the business.

Think about the office assistant example we shared earlier. If your recognition

strategies constantly reward sales team members for closing deals and identifying

leads, but rarely showcase the office assistant who makes copies, schedules travel,

or otherwise empowers those sales workers to get the job done, then you’ve paved

the way for bitterness and disengagement.

Standardizing your performance appraisal program can help you identify how

and why you currently recognize positive contributions from team members and

help you notice gaps in your plans that need to be dealt with so every team

member gets the attention they deserve.

4. Goal setting

Remember how we said effective performance appraisals can lead to engagement

because the review process helps with skills development? Goal setting is a major
part of that. A performance review will, in the best of circumstances, give

employees ideas about where they want to go in their careers, how that fits within

the current business, and what they can do to develop the skills they need. But

that isn’t where goal setting ends.

You can also use performance appraisals to make day-to-day life better for

everybody in the business. Imagine you have an employee who is great at what

they do, but they work in really unconventional ways that make it difficult for

other team members. You can use performance appraisal to navigate those

conflicts by

 Bringing the unconventional practices up and highlighting why they

create tension

 Listening to the employee’s point of view about why those behaviors

are important to their process

 Identifying opportunities to compromise

 Setting tangible goals for the employee and the business to create a

better work environment without diminishing how the unique work

style fuels effective performance from a quality team member

This type of short-term goal setting can be used to resolve conflict, help employees

break bad habits, and give the business insight into cultural issues that could

affect employee performance.

You can also use performance appraisals to measure employee output based on

key metrics, which allows you to more clearly and coherently provide feedback.

For example, a manager may notice an employee who is often scrambling and

stressed out trying to keep up with their workload. On the surface, the employee
may seem disorganized. But encouraging that worker to get more organized is not

only a broad instruction that’s difficult to take action on, it may not even capture

what’s actually causing problems.

Through a performance appraisal, the manager can gather data and feedback that

confirms the employee seems to be constantly scrambling and stressed. Perhaps

colleagues mention lots of close calls on deadlines or inflexibility when

scheduling, but the data also reveals that the employee’s workload is out of

balance.

Maybe operational demands have forced that employee to take on tasks that

require a skill they haven’t really developed. Perhaps the team is extremely short-

staffed. With this information, the manager can work with the employee to set

goals for developing a specific skill and to communicate workload challenges

before they escalate. At the same time, the manager can set a personal goal to

check in with employees within a couple of weeks of a new assignment to ensure

that everyone has a balanced workload.