Getting started up again. Didn’t get enough sleep again last night. Need to change my Sunday Night habits. The current plan just isn’t working.
Talking about performance appraisal today.Performance appraisal is the process of evaluating an employee’s behavior and results relative to his performance standards.
Performance appraisal is important to do well. Done poorly, it can engender a lot of bad feelings. Who does the appraising varies from organization to organization and situation to situation. Most commonly, the employee’s supervisor does the evaluating. In some organizations, peer evaluations by coworkers are used instead or in addition. Every now and then you’ll see self-evaluation systems. Sometimes there will be systems based on customer evaluation.
There are various methods for displaying appraisal data. The most common in the business world is the Graphic Rating Scale. This system rates the appraised individual on a number of categories, and produces a graph based on the results.
A second appraisal method is alternation. Alternation involves rating employees relative to each other. First you choose your best employee, and then you select your worst employee. Then you repeat the process with the remaining pool of unselected employees, until you end up with all employees ranked relative to each other.
Under the paired comparison method, you break the job into categories, and then rate each employee against the other in each category, as simply better or worse, and the results are placed in a matrix. Once all the rankings have been performed, one can compare the results to see where employees happen relative to each other.
The forced distribution method requires the appraiser to rate the employees and fit the results into a predetermined result profile. This is often a normal distribution. Really aggressive sales forces use this method, and companies which are trying to reduce their staff and decide who to cut.
The Critical Incident method requires the evaluator to make note whenever something important happens during the evaluation period, positive or negative, and base evaluations on that data.
Management By Objective assigns objectives to employees or departments and rates the employees based on progress towards those objectives.
There is a trend toward computerization of appraisal. This can be particularly effective in industries with physically trackable criteria, like trucking or part production. Or tech support, for that matter. Track call times and success rates.
Appraisal can be difficult to do well. Often standards for appraisal are unclear. It can be difficult to keep actual performance and appraiser performance distinct from each other; this is often called the “halo effect”. Evaluations can display a “central tendency”; that is, evaluations will tend toward average or middle results. Bias can be a problem.