Everyone loves conducting and receiving Appraisals, don’t they?

Here’s a recent quote from ‘The Times’

the problem with appraisals is extreme. They take different forms in different companies, but what they have in common is that they are usually annual, usually involve a tense exchange between employer and employee, have a knack of being timed to coincide with the employee making a major cockup, and invariably leave both parties depressed.

One of the reasons they don’t work is that bosses are useless at assessing employee performance. This is because managers tend to (i) have a bias towards people similar to them; (ii) mark people, in general, averagely; (iii) base their assessments on random events they vaguely recall rather than on a comprehensive view of someone’s work; and (iv) focus on the work that the employee has done on projects important to the development of their own careers.

Meanwhile, appraisals are onerous for employees because they are human beings and therefore object to being graded like farmyard chickens and stabbed in the chest in broad daylight. Even a positive appraisal can have a powerfully demotivating effect on a good employee if it is less enthusiastic than the one they got last year, or if they discover someone incompetent received an equally positive assessment.

the problem with appraisals is extreme. They take different forms in different companies, but what they have in common is that they are usually annual, usually involve a tense exchange between employer and employee, have a knack of being timed to coincide with the employee making a major cockup, and invariably leave both parties depressed.

One of the reasons they don’t work is that bosses are useless at assessing employee performance. This is because managers tend to (i) have a bias towards people similar to them; (ii) mark people, in general, averagely; (iii) base their assessments on random events they vaguely recall rather than on a comprehensive view of someone’s work; and (iv) focus on the work that the employee has done on projects important to the development of their own careers.

Meanwhile, appraisals are onerous for employees because they are human beings and therefore object to being graded like farmyard chickens and stabbed in the chest in broad daylight. Even a positive appraisal can have a powerfully demotivating effect on a good employee if it is less enthusiastic than the one they got last year, or if they discover someone incompetent received an equally positive assessment.

So, the traditional approach to Appraisals results in:

•             Huge amounts of stress

•             A ridiculous amount of wasted time and effort

•             Demotivated and unhappy people

And this is a process put together by the HR Department in order to get better performance!!!!