Tired of Dealing with Employee Appraisal Issues? Learn to Make It More Effective.

Is once-in-a-year, backward-looking performance review conversation with your employees enough? Does lack of regular feedback to employees make annual employee appraisal dead and meaningless? 

Yes, it does!

These days, employees, managers and HR (yes, they too!) love to hate employee performance appraisals. Most performance reviews are executed so poorly that they may seem meaningless to all the stakeholders.

It is true that many growing organizations ignore the shortcomings of their annual performance appraisal process. This ignorance can have further consequences,if organizations realize how expensive their employee evaluation process is! The total cost of running an appraisal cycle for an employee includes multiple hidden costs, like employee self-evaluation time, manager’s preparation time, HR review process time and the time taken to identify training needs, setup promotions, transfers and increments, generate letters and communicate with employees.

If an organization wants to take up the challenge to revise its employee appraisal process, the initial step is to completely understand the potential challenges associated with the performance management process.

Common Challenges in Annual Employee Performance Appraisal

1.    Unable to Evaluate Real-time Performance

Managers often focus on an employee’s personal traits, knowledge and behaviour while rating employees in performance assessments. These parameters may contribute to an individual’s performance evaluation; but managers also need to shift their focus on factors that measure an employee’s real-time productivity.

In such a situation, HR and managers find difficulties in identifying what goals were assigned to an employee and how much they have achieved in a specific time-period.

2.    Lack of Effectiveness

In annual employee performance reviews, managers miss out the chance to identify and address employee performance issues. Instead, they focus more on rating employee’s productivity levels.

Inadequate formal feedback on their performance and lack of timely reminders on goal achievement restrict low-performers from being as competent as top performers.

3.    Absence of Performance Data

Organizations that manage their HR processes manually often face challenges in managing yearly appraisal data of all employees. In such cases, managers completely rely on their memory to recall past achievements of their team members. In fact, they are unable to identify the sudden changes in performance of a team member. This makes employee appraisal fuzzy and unsatisfactory for employees.

4.    Difficult to Identify Employee Development Needs

Annual performance reviews are considered effective only when employees get opportunities to improve their skills, capabilities and enhance knowledge. In absence of employee training and development programs, managers are unable to identify training needs and strengths of their team members. Putting employees on annual assessments without giving them chance to develop skills is unfair which results in employee dissatisfaction.

THE SOLUTION – An Automated Employee Appraisal Software Can Rescue You!

If you have ever faced any of these performance appraisal challenges, make sure you read the next few lines even more carefully.

Employee performance appraisals become more effective, if employees are given regular feedback and their real-time performance is evaluated in true sense.

Before managers sit for performance evaluation discussion, they should assess employee’s achievements in respect to the goals initially assigned to them.This concept of employee performance evaluation makes it important to set up employee goal sheets for a specific period and evaluate employee performance accordingly. This can be done with the help of a cloud-based employee appraisal software.

An automated appraisal system offers multiple benefits to an organization that are listed below.

·      Managers and employees can mutually set goals and predictable timelines to achieve them.At the time of appraisals, they can view goal sheets to clearly view what was assigned to an individual and what has been achieved so far.

·      Managers can share feedback with their team members on regular intervals.

·      Managers can capture notes regarding performance and behaviour of each team member. They can refer to these notes during evaluations for fair performance ratings.

·      HR and managers can identify employee training needs and put them on suitable development plans so that employees can improve their skills and capabilities and improve level of their performance.

·      Managers can access old employee appraisal data to see variations in employee performance over a specific period.

·      Managers can easily compare multiple team members on the same competencies or they can view manager scores for multiple employees at the same time.

 ·      The leadership, HR and managers can view employee appraisal dashboards to get a bird’s eye view on how their team members/ employees are doing. In a customizable appraisal module, managers and HR get to see employee appraisal review data in the form of full report and dashboards which highlights the appraisal status, appraisal score distribution, Bell Curve and identifies top performers (in a 9-grid box).

Isn’t this amazing!!

Would you like to experience these features and make your employee appraisal more effective? If so, take a free trial of this world-class HR software and gain deeper insights!