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By Moses Munene I am due to have my annual employee appraisal. In HR parlance, it is also called a performance evaluation or performance review. It is a moment fraught with discomfort for the appraisee and for managers; some detest that it can be laden with controversy. In fact, some authors state that given a choice, some managers would be happier on a dentist’s chair than conduct an appraisal. One of the contentious issues is when the evaluation is linked to pay awards. Rewarding some and not others destroys the team ethic that many a workplace would like to foster. In the words of McGregor, ‘Managers are uncomfortable when they are in the position of playing God’. This is worse when their comments and ratings determine the size of the reward to the appraisee. It could ignite tension between manager and staff and among staff because natural human behaviour is to resist anything other than favourable judgements. How motivating would a employee be after being graded as ‘average’ and therefore receives a pittance for a pay rise? At worst appraisal could turn the workplace into a school playground; an arena of giant popularity contests and can be worsened by the subjectivity of the fluid grading of 1-5 or Poor - Excellent. Susan in accounts will gloat about her score of 4 compared to Alex in engineering who scored a paltry 3. A friend spent 2 hrs filling in an online appraisee preparation form and gave himself top marks in every category. Another in his project review crossed out Achieved and wrote Exceptional. The Senior Supervisor checked with the appraisee’s Co-Supervisor if this was so. He replied yes and so she signed it off; controversy and demotivation avoided. The objective of appraisals is to change behaviour. It therefore makes little value to grade down Tim for his deficiencies in customer service that happened in January. Remedial action would have been useful if Tim’s review was immediately after his faults were noted. Does this call for on going ad hoc performance reviews rather than a one-off annual reflective window? Often appraisers may suffer the halo and horns effects. This is when an isolated favourable aspect clouds the manager’s judgement and all subsequent aspects are rated highly even though the appraisee may be weaker in these. Or the converse may happen; where one poor rating influences all other areas of appraisal ignoring any good performances. It is not all doom and gloom. The sessions can identify some good training and development needs and managers can use the appraisals to conduct a skills audit of their staff. It is amazing what hidden talents may lie untapped within a team. Without a drastic change in design, conduct, content and objectives of appraisals, they will remain the mechanical box- ticking, highly subjective, backward looking and paper pushing annual events. I hope mine will have very little of these. Have you been an appraisee or appraiser lately? Please share your views and experiences
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