Talking to someone on performance appraisal/review/management (whatever you choose to call it) made it clear that there are multi-faceted uses for the process.
1. It helps to review an organization/group/team or individual's performance
2. It helps to reinforce behavioral and cultural norms
3. It helps to plan and ready your workforce for the future business direction
4. It helps to develop your team
If it serves so many functions why is it often such a de-energising and negative process?
Hi Gautam,
ReplyDeleteHappy to reach your blog, good stuff. I'm a second year PhD student, specializing in Human Performance Improvement.
One key thing that I guess is relevant here is alignment. More often than not, the term performance appraisal is equated directly with salary increase, which makes it so unappealing and ineffective.
I talked with a manager at a Fab unit here, and he says that his employees will not share any information for improving performance, as they stand to lose getting a raise if everyone performs at the same level. This seems to be a classic case of misaligned goals, where you are practicing negative reinforcement, by rewarding the "non-sharing" of knowledge.
I guess its upto HR/OD professionals to close this gap through innovative policies and metrics. Any experiences to share?
It seems to be more and more peole are accepting that performance appraisal does not actual help with those things. The best sources I know of are chapter 9 (Performance Without Appraisal) of The Leader's Handbooks and the book Abolishing Performance Appraisals. See more of my thoughts on Performance without Appraisal.
ReplyDeletePerformance appraisal is just a bad way to do what people claim as the reasons it is needed. Slowly people are realizing that, but many organizations are very poor at changing - even when something is obviously not working.