Performance Appraisal

Appraisals and performance assessment are an essential part of every organization whether big or small. Performance evaluations are generally based on the assessment of progress and productivity, job credentials and skill sets, and personality and behavior traits of employees. They are based on a person�s competencies and in a way recognize his talent.

Normally appraisals are conducted annually or half-yearly and a traditional top-down appraisal strategy is followed where the superiors appraise their underlings. But, very often appraisals are not fair because of various reasons �at times the managers don't have a clear idea about the performance of his junior, negative feedback from his immediate superiors because of personal conflicts or other personal grudges.

Today, 360 degree appraisals are widely used our organizations to ensure a fair performance appraisal process.

Grade/recommendation/summary as applicable:

Signed and dated by appraisee: and by appraiser:

B9 Other issues (to be covered separately outside of this appraisal -continue on a separate sheet if necessary):

Refer to the guidance notes. Personal development and support must be offered to all employees, irrespective of age, gender, race, disability, etc., and not just to those seeking promotion. Development is not restricted to job skills - it includes 'whole person'. Use your imagination. Job skills training isn't restricted to courses. Think about coaching, mentoring (by and of the appraisee), secondment to another role, holiday job cover, shadowing, distance-learning, e-learning, books, videos, attending meetings and workshops, workbooks, manuals and guides,researching, giving presentations; anything relevant, helpful and agreed to help the person develop. Avoid committing to training expenditure before suitable approval or availability has been confirmed. Understand development options and procedures before conducting the appraisal. Develop the whole person.

B8 Discuss and agree (as far as is possible, given budgetary, availability and authorisation considerations) the training and development support to be given to help the appraisee meet the agreed objectives above.

Adding to the above mentioned responces.

1. Intially, it would be tough for any manager to scale a employee at the end of the year. Month one-on-one where the manager and the employee discuss about the Achivement,Training and development,Concerns, Goals(SWOT format) where both employee and manager sign on this particular document.
2. End of the year respective manager will go through these monthly one-on-one based on these a sutible Career Path is formulated.
3. Everytime we have a heard approach towards these Appraisal and training. Design these based on your industry,culture and workforce.

 Regards,

SK

Hi Sarada,

 I belong to IT industry with Banking as specilisation. It is difficult to provide entire lifecycle of good PMS in this space but I can take out some of the best practices in Banks and IT Industry which can be useful inputs.

 IT Industry:

1. Personal Performance Parameters - Performance parameters are technical and soft skills to cover 180 degree of employee. (Personal Victory)

2. Organisation parameters - Another 180 degree covers his team dynamics and performance, his alignments of actions and thoughts with his boss and boss's boss i.e. Top management side of employee.  (Public Victory)

3. Growth Paramters - How employee would like to see him in next 1/3 years in terms of his personal and public victory. ( Sharpen the Saw) as well as for managers leadership qualities (Similar to Habit 8).

Methodology followed  is to capture the parameters each year with

step 1 as self apprisal where employee need to do self assessment ( Usually asked to do it faithfully but never done so sometimes :-))

Step 2 - Apprisal with reporting manager and

step 3 sometimes covered as part of apprisal of reporting manager about his leadership or Apprisal with reporting boss's boss.

Step 4 - HR captures and covers it into weighted average  of these parameters ( with mix of Management inputs and company performance parameters)

Step 5 - Output is in two forms

A. Incentives and other financial rewards calculatd ( Bricks and Bats)

B. Training and career improvement plan for HR and Traning dept.

 Since, I am dire fan of Stephen Covey I tried to map with his Effectiveness Habits model for humans.

Banking Industry:

1. Personal performance Parameters - Banking is driven by operations and metrics used is volumn of business generated or handled, for managers new products and it's success in terms of returns/revenue generation.

2. Organiasational PArameters like branding, growth etc. for general manager or VP kind of profile are measured but mainly assessed for team and leadership qualities.

Methodology is not 360/180 degree feddback and usually one on one meeting for performance cum feedback session happens informaly with HR report goes into employee record.

Hi Sarada,

1) Appraisals depend on Managers, Senior Manager's and Leads. Company says that if an employee is not satisfied with his appraisal, he can approach the seniors, when an employee approaches its of no use. Instead employee is targeted just because he went to senior management,starts feeling uncomfortable in the team and ultimately employee decides to switch. Politics, favourism takes a major role.

2) Transperency is in papers, reality is in the hidden policies which will be put across at the end in most of the organizations.

3) Companies are more concerned about getting business and least bothered about Employees needs.

Hi,

 Quite a number of good answers, as said to measure performance expectations should be set and later evaluated. But evaluation is a very critical part so all the expectation set should be very atomic and discrete in nature. Purpose is they should be easily calculative or converted to numbers. Avoid expectations like "Improve Communication", improve product performance, fixing bugs (if you have to add this put a number), R&D etc.

Hi,

As per my experience, PMS is in place in most of the organizations as a process but not used in a right manner.  This is the toughest hurdle for any Project Manager and HR to satisfy the employee.  This is the process of  performance evaluation.  In Software Industry setting up Goals is not at all easy, as you dont know what kind of work we are going to do.  Some times development project which is scaled on delivarables, some times Support project which is scaled on SLAs. Instead of saying Goals if you say expectations on employee will sounds good for me.  Expecations on the employee will be setup at the starting of the year based on their experience.   There is no certainity of the manager who setup the expectations for you will evaluate it in the end of the year. So performance  should be evaluated once in 3-6 months as the employee will also know how he/she needs to improve performance and  can plan how to meet the expecations.  This will record how the employee is improving his/her performance.

Performance evaluation of an employee should be done by their  supervisor/manager and suboordinates(if any) also. This centralize the evaluation process and subordinate need not to look for supervisor's mercy.  And I feel this improve co-ordination in the team. 

But most of the organizations will not follow the ethics of the process, as they already decides the percentages of increments and  finds the critical projects where they need to keep employees happy.  This spoils the transperancy of the process.  

I drafted my thoughts depending on my experience.  Hope this makes sense and useful.  I am not a Project Manager or HR, so that I dont know what are the difficulties they have in implementing the process.  Please let me know your comments if any.

The system requirement may vary from industry to industry job to job it is always unique and always imperfect.

About Performance Appraisal first: 

A common lacuna which I see is lack of pre-information about how one's appraisal is written. Boss never calls his subordinate and discusses his appraisal. The appraisal is always made a supense thriller. The idea behind this is that if his paper is not good then he(employee) will at least work from the day of writing to the day of announcement. This is how we grow up and become bosses ourselelves and then behave in the same manner.

Secondly the self appraisal is not given any importance by the committees and frankly saying I do not know either how to utilise it.

About T&D now:

I can  only talk about construction industry in India. 1.The formal trainings (IF ANY) are too general to be useful, 2.On job trainees are treated as manpower (but not in MIS), 3. "Stop, Learn and Start afresh" sounds too theoretical to our managers, 4. Learning by making mistakes is traditionally preferred over proper Training