Employee Performance Appraisal — An Ideal System
by Dick GroteCategories : Performance Management, Performance Appraisal, Performance Improvement , add a comment
Creating a Link Between Company Success and Employee Accountability
In America’s best-run and most-admired organizations, employee performance appraisal is a vital and vigorous management tool. No other management process has as much influence on individuals’ careers and work lives.
Used well, employee performance appraisal is the most powerful instrument that organizations have to mobilize the energy of every employee in the enterprise toward the achievement of strategic goals. Employee performance appraisal can focus each person’s attention on the company’s mission, vision and values. And ideally, the process can answer the two fundamental questions that every single person in the organization wants the answers to: What do you expect of me? And How am I doing?
But most folks scoff at the idea that there might be a perfect system for doing employee performance appraisal. They think that since their organization is “unique,” then their system for analyzing employee performance must be unique, too. How foolish.
Don’t scoff — there is an ideal method for the assessment process. In organizations that take employee performance appraisal seriously and use the process well, the system functions as an on-going process – not merely an annual event – by following a four-phase model.
Phase 1 — Employee Performance Planning
At the beginning of the year, the manager meets with each person for discussion on the planning piece of the employee performance appraisal process. In this hour-long session they discuss the “how” and the “what” of the job:
How the person will do the job (the behaviors and competencies expected of the company’s members), and
What results the person will achieve over the next twelve months (the key responsibilities of the person’s job and the goals and projects the person will work on).
They also discuss the individual’s development plans. This discussion immediately generates improved employee performance because people know exactly what’s expected of them. And as the manager, you have just earned the right to hold people accountable at the end of the year by making your expectations of them clear from the start.